Boomtown Boudoir

I figured out how to go through life gracefully without changing out of my yoga pants, ever. Today I did this thing where I found an old sock and cut the toes out of it, then rolled it up into a doughnut shape resembling one of these:

My hair went into a high ponytail and I pulled it through my sock doughnut as though it were a scrunchy. Then I arranged the ponytail hair around the doughnut so it looked like a big, fat bun–the kind you’d get if you actually had a lot of hair, which I don’t. Then I secured it with a regular ponytail holder at the base and pinned the hair that wasn’t in the bun around the base.

I put some makeup on.  I neglected to change out of my yoga pants. If you get the bun right, you look like an off-duty ballerina instead of some scrubby slob who prefers comfort over fashion. Ballerinas work hard, you know. They’ve earned the right to run around in sweats. By virtue of the ballerina sock bun, now I have too.

Here’s the terrifying thing about stabbing yourself in the thigh to make a point: you can only do it once. Best not push a bitch, Brutus.

Painting: “Portia Wounding Her Thigh” by Elizabetta Sirani.

“Watch later tonight. When the lights go on, they scatter like cockroaches.” I shiver at the way PJ draws out the syllables in that last word. From my vantage point in the raised DJ booth, I can see how it might be an appropriate metaphor. I think of the sick feeling it used to give me in my old apartment when I woke up in the middle of the night for a glass of water and turned on the light only to see what seemed like hundreds of the scaly vermin waddling their fat stoic little bodies across the countertop, the oven range, the floor, and disappear. A righteous human disgust made unpleasant only by the accompanying suck of terror at catching what hides in the corners in the act of not caring about you. Then I think of the moment in the nights when the lights switch on, exposing pores, smeared makeup, stretch marks, basic imperfections that the black-lit darkness smooths and sculpts into the impossible aquarium perfection found only in subterranean places. The way we all walk in those ridiculous stilt-like shoes, like our hips are disjointed from the rest of our bodies; the way that might look if someone were doing it fast; scurrying for a safe crack to hide from the light. Then I imagine being PJ, going to work on the weekends, knowing that he would see the cockroach thing happen tonight and feel the same sick fascination he must have felt the first night.

“This never stops being surreal. It doesn’t matter how long you stay. I know you’ll try to intellectualize the whole thing, it’s how you are, but you won’t be able to. There is no rationale for any of it. It’ll always keep moving out from under you.” He spreads his hands out, palms down, in the direction of the stage, where legs and hair sway, gentle as seaweed, accompanied by the grinding guitars of Marilyn Manson’s “Dope Show.” He looks at me. I look at him. I don’t know what I’m thinking; it’s all visceral recognition, the kind you get when someone makes it impossible for you to write them off.
“Okay, I think this has gone on a little too long; people might catch on,” he says and I’m surprised, although he’s probably right. I don’t want to leave. I also don’t want to be having this conversation with him here. Something about standing in the DJ booth at a strip club, dressed in wisps of glow-in-the-dark violet leopard print and struggling to connect with someone in a healthy, humanish manner strikes me as both absurd and some less weighty synonym for tragic. “Oh, am I being dismissed?” I ask.

“You and the vocabulary words,” he says, laughing.

“Well. Thanks for the dialogue,” I say, and he smiles. I leave and retreat into the dressing room, feeling my little tendrils of feeling retreat back into the flesh armor I use to keep everyone else here off the important stuff.

*

“No, you come to the club where I work tonight. It’s so slow and I miss you. I need you start driving your car here right now, okay?” I’ve never seen her here before tonight, but her name is Genie and her high-pitched, strident voice is every imaginable stereotype of an asian girl talking loudly in public on her cell phone, complete with switched L and R consonants. I’m back in the dressing room alternately brushing my hair and staring at the wall. There are a bunch of us back there doing more or less the same thing: Alexis, Kiki, Keisha, and Sincere. Slow, boring Friday night. Having been dismissed from PJ duty, I have nothing better to do, but now I’m glad for it. “You come to the club right now? What you mean you can’t? You get in your car and drive here.” Then Genie’s voice picks up an added register of low-grade menace: “Oh, you little fucker! You fucker! This is good cookie, mister, good cookie, and you don’t even know what you getting, dumbass!”

Alexis catches my eye in the mirror. We raise our eyebrows at each other. “Is she for real?” Alexis mouths. I nod at her like, I think so. When I look over at Keisha, she’s smiling into her eyeshadow palette. Kiki’s got a hand to her forehead and the strained expression of someone holding on to their composure by a thread. Only Sincere is doing a good job of pretending she’s not listening to this, but she probably actually isn‘t.

“Look, dumbass, what I tell you when I meet you and you don’t know how to do pussy-eating? I tell you I show you how and you do pussy-eating okay now. I teach you fucking, before you don’t even know. You get another heart attack now I take away this good cookie. You fat and bald and you already have one heart attack. I give you another one, fucker!” I can’t help it, I start laughing out loud and can’t stop. Alexis plasters both hands over her mouth, shoulders shaking helplessly. Sincere looks up from an In Touch magazine and her eyes go wide. That pushes all of us over the edge. We are howling like monkeys.

“I may be stripper but I am no stupid. The pussy, it come with me when I leave you sorry fat bald ass, fucker. I know things. I know about art. That was my ex who sell that painting at garage sale, dumbass. He don’t know what it was, he don’t know who I am. And I need sewing machine. Go to Wal-Mart and get sewing machine for me, sewing machine’s cheap. I gave that one to my teacher. She had no sewing machine so I have her borrow. Dumbass, just go to Wal-Mart! Not like sewing machine going to break your house!”

“Oh my God,” Alexis yelps between spasms of laughter. Kiki puts her head down on the counter, moaning. I can hardly breathe and my stomach hurts and it feels good, like something I needed tonight.

*

“What are you thinking about?” asked PJ. I was looking at his three gray eyelashes and mentally turning them into something far more profound than they actually were.

“Just looking.” Pause. “What are you thinking about?”

“Just looking.”

He bent down and kissed my left nipple so cinematically I was sure he knew I was watching this and thinking it was beautiful. “Okay, I’m leaving in five minutes. Unless you want to kick me out now,” he said.

“I think I like the company,” I said, burying my face in the pillow. I stretched out next to him and he spooned me, head on my shoulder, hand artfully arranged around my waist. It felt so good I toyed with the idea of kicking him out right then, before I had the dangerous chance to get used to it. I listened to him breathe for awhile, feeling my heartbeat slow down and my thoughts fade out into a lulling static.

“All right, I have to get out of here,” he said. “Places to see, people to do.”

Yuck, I thought. He got up and put his shirt on. I turned my face to the wall. “Are you letting me out or am I letting myself out?” I got up and put a big shirt on over my underwear, and we walked out of my apartment, down the stairs, half-blinded in the hazy morning sun. I wasn’t ready for it to be morning yet. On the doorstep, my half-naked self half-obscured by the door, we kissed. PJ smiled at me. I smiled back. “See you next week?” he asked and I nodded. I shut the door right as he was looking back to see if I was watching him go. I slitted my eyes against the hollow darkness of the hallway.

“This is good cookie, mister,” I whispered to myself as I walked back up the stairs.

4.2 oz is a lot of perfume, especially when you’re buying it mostly for the bottle in a country where the exchange rate increases the price by almost 50% and you could just as easily get it cheaper in New York. If you were less prone to whimsical, willful, and expensive mistakes, you might have reasoned yourself out of a purchase at the Guerlain store in Paris and ignored the carnivorous mauve-lipped smile of the sales assistant who stood watching you agonize in front of the tiny embossed Victorian bees and scallops that decorate the bottles of the exclusive-ish Les Parisiennes perfume collection. You wouldn’t have considered the touching anxiety of your travel companion, childhood friend, and ex-lost cause as he waited for you to make up your mind, hoping almost audibly that you would just make yourself happy. You wouldn’t have been half-drunk, dazzled, and so overwhelmed by the bright shiny glinting things on display that you would have actually bought one of them to take home with you and remind you of… what, exactly? Paris, and all of your attendant straining to be inoffensive without compromising your integrity? You certainly wouldn’t have handed over your credit card solely because it was sort of ridiculous to stand mutely for so long in front of a perfume display while the little voices in your head turned this decision into one that was more about the cost of self-loathing than the cost of pleasure.

But you would have felt really, really, really good the second the deed was done and the sales assistant went scampering back to the stockroom to find you some sort of promised free present. You would have laughed out loud with a lot of suddenly-effortless affection when you realized that Aaron had scouted out the only male (sales assistant) in the store and was now engaging him in (spirited, largely one-sided) debate about Sweden’s role in international politics. You would have been genuinely stoked when the sales assistant came back out on the floor with a free atomizer for your bottle of perfume, because you were, as she announced loudly, “so quaint.” You’d have smiled as you left the store with your beautiful Guerlain bag stuffed full of samples and gifts-with-purchase, even when the same sales assistant called gaily after you, “say thank you to mommy!” Insinuating, perhaps, that you American tourists were all alike–spending mommy’s money on expensive gifts for yourself to bring back home to your bloated continent and brag about in the locker room after tennis practice. It would have all been better outside, though, with the fairyland twinkle of the Champs Elysees demonstrating exactly why Paris is known as the “city of lights.“ When Aaron said, “how old did that woman think we were?” you would have shrugged. “I don’t think either of us look young enough for that mommy thing to make sense,” you’d have told him. “Maybe it’s because we’re so quaint.”

“But she liked us,” he said. “Look at all of the stuff you got.”

“We’re likeable kids,” you might have replied. “Very quaint, though. Like the Amish.”

“Maybe it’s the sneakers,” said Aaron, looking down at your feet in their ratty New Balances.

“Maybe ‘quaint’ means something different to her than it does to us.” You would have understood, though, that the sales assistant had been responding to more to your long staring session with the bottle you just purchased than any of your other superficial details. It had been the perfect example of the unabashed display of giving a fuck in public that would shame a proper Parisienne, but since you were in no way even remotely qualified to impersonate one of those, she‘d found it… well, quaint. And like the eager-to-be-pleased puppy dog you may well actually be, you’d have pulled your good nature tightly around yourself and chalked the whole thing up to, “golly gee whillikers, Jim Bob, these here folks sure are different!” Then you’d have had an Aaron to narrate your walk back to the metro in a corny Lumiere-from-Beauty-and-the-Beast French accent, brushing aside your hair to stage-whisper, “le poisson! Les fromages!” smarmily in your ear while those around you dutifully ignored both your retarded amoureux and their own beautiful city.

You might have brought the bottle home and forgotten about it for a good month or so, taking it out only to admire the bees and scallops on the bottle, the sweet little white-suede cravat beneath the precise austerity of the atomizer. You’d sprayed it onto your skin in the store, of course, and enjoyed it no more and no less than any other perfume you’d been on the fence about buying. You knew the conflicted history: either created in 1929 by Jacques Guerlain as an one-up on the Chanel No. 5 he caught his wife dabbling in, or else in 1933 as a signature fragrance for Rose Kennedy, neither option holding much particular interest for you. But, much like your trip to Paris in general, your new bottle of Guerlain’s Liu did not capture your imagination until after the fact; when it had had a chance to settle a bit.

“Ugh, hotel soap!” Aaron had said of Liu, which would also explain why you didn’t wear it until you were both safely back on your respective continents. Tim, the Frenchman, had nodded vigorously upon smelling it and said, “that’s the one.” You don’t know what you thought about it then, just what you think about it now, which is that Liu makes you want to write in pretentious Marguerite Duras tenses and suffer nobly in some kind of improbable hat, turning yourself into the prism that reflects your experiences back in rainbows and sunbeams on a glassy marble floor. It’s not the roses, backyard-blowsy and simpering while the more angular and sophisticated jasmine note whispers something filthy in their ears. Neither is it the sunny, playful bergamot that arrives at just the right moment with a pitcher of lemonade. It could be the way this scene of potential intrigue dries down into a smooth, mellow woodsy-vanilla dusk, sending the roses back inside and leading the jasmine away from the punch-bowl. But you think that what you might like best is the soft-focus effect of the aldehydes, used here like a camera lens smeared with Vaseline in a 1970s porno, making sure we know that all of it has been nothing more than a dream.

For this reason, Liu suits you in a way many of your other perfumes do not: it has managed to say something true about the way you see the world. A shift in the quality of the light is often the purest form of reality for you, the cue you’re always waiting for, the difference between a good decision and a bad one.

“Andy would bicycle across town in the rain to bring you/ candy and John would buy the gown for you to wear to the/ prom with Tom the astronomer who’d name a star for you/ but I’m the luckiest guy on the Lower East Side/ cause I’ve got wheels and you want to go for a ride”

–From “The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side,” Magnetic Fields

It could be said that one of the major reasons I have never gotten my driver’s license is because there have always been people around to do the driving for me. And by people, I mean boys. These boys weren’t my boyfriends, they were other boys, boys who were content just to have company as they glided over the roads in the most satisfyingly corporeal proof of adulthood imaginable. I don’t know why I never wanted a piece of this for my own, or why I equated the cars of boys with freedom when I was not the one doing the driving. But ever since I was finally old enough for my parents to allow me to get into the cars of my peers, I have been an avid passenger: all rapt eyes and enthusiasm, even when we weren’t really going anywhere. The same could be said for these not-my-boyfriends and their company. I wanted the sensation without the commitment. And the times that I have been able to obtain that have been among some of the happiest and most terrifying moments in my life.

First came Josh, in high school. He drove me to school (or, often, not) every morning in a secondhand white-and-wood-panel Wagoneer like the very privilege of owning a car was a dare from the universe to drive it as fast as he could. I wasn’t scared. Josh was an honor student. He had a mix tape that we used specifically for driving called “Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood.” This was my first exposure to bands like Archers of Loaf, Man or… Astroman?, Stereolab, and Shudder to Think. I had a copy of it to listen to at home, but it only seemed to work its indie rock magic when we were going somewhere: the mall, the lake, High Rocks, some faraway diner. I have always thought that music was best experienced in someone else’s fast car; I still do. The freedom of being able to get Josh (who never needed much coaxing) to drive somewhere other than school was freedom as pure and absolute as I have ever known it. As Ntozake Shange would say, “WE WAZ GROWN. WE WAZ FINALLY GROWN.”

Eric was a Jersey boy, a pragmatic Virgo in an avant-garde prog band who made my acquaintance when he walked up to the coffee shop table where I was sitting with my college girlfriends and asked us if we wanted to go smoke some weed. From that point on, he and his car were mine, all mine. He’d drive into the city from Jersey at the drop of a hat, get me stoned, and play bootleg tapes of bands whose names I wouldn’t be able to remember even if I’d been sober. Eric was wise to my specific form of crack: he knew I just liked to ride, didn’t matter where. So he’d just drive anywhere. Sometimes we would go to his band’s practice space and I would lie on the carpet while they played, feeling the music’s vibrations through the floor, and it was almost as good as riding. We lost contact for a year or so and then I heard that he died in a car crash. This news reverberated deeply: I’d often experienced such passive ecstasy in his car that I’d thought if I died, it would be a good way to go, with the stereo up and the windows down. But I’d never thought it would actually happen, not to me or to him.

By the time Derek made his big move, my affinity for the cars of boys I was not necessarily going to even kiss must have been notorious, because he knew all about it already. He waited until he had a vintage navy-blue Benz in his driveway before beginning his campaign of phone calls and flowers left on the steps of my job. In the end, all he really had to do was let me see it. As soon as I was situated inside this beautiful beast with the seatbelt buckled firmly across my chest, Derek demonstrated the sound system by blasting Ink and Dagger so loud that I couldn’t even hear my own protests as he drove wildly over the bridge and into New Jersey in the space of about three minutes. This was a trip that should have taken at least ten. I almost pissed myself. It didn’t help when he started screaming over the music, “I’m Batman and you’re Vicky Vale!” I was grateful that I made it home to slam my front door in his face. Later I learned that he had been flush in the middle of a bona fide psychotic episode. Later still, I would get into a different car with him and hold his hand that wasn’t on the steering wheel. Later than even that, I would understand that a passenger was probably the last thing Derek needed, in his car or otherwise.

Bader drove me out to Ocean City one afternoon in October with the sun setting spectacularly beyond the bridge. I was wearing a fuzzy white sweater. My boyfriend did not understand why I would do a thing like this to him, even though Bader was just a friend. He wasn’t just a friend, really. At least, he didn’t want to be. I didn’t care. It was shortly after September 11th and I felt this painful but irresistible pressure to live my life the way it was meant to be lived: the edges blurred, as though glimpsed through a passenger’s seat window. My boyfriend drove me all over the city, wherever I wanted, on his Vespa, and it should have been enough. But it wasn’t. I needed Ocean City, too. Mostly because it was such a luxuriantly long drive. To the amazement of probably all parties involved, I didn’t cheat on my boyfriend that night. But the damage to that relationship had been done. My boyfriend knew all about me after that; he knew I’d get into a car with anyone regardless of where they were going.

PJ was the last of my great platonic chauffeurs. I’m not quite sure where I get off calling him platonic, either, except that he was always someone else’s and therefore not to be taken seriously. He had one of those special cards that police give to their friends to keep them out of trouble and put a lot of faith into this thing. PJ was like that generally; prone to discarding reason for superstition. You couldn’t convince him that the reason police stopped people in the first place was because they were already driving dangerously. I didn’t like this, but I liked the way it felt when he drove like we were in a video game, like the road might suddenly drop out from beneath us and his SUV would just rise into the sky like a shiny black bird. It was like we were eighteen even though we were both much older. Something about the combination of his recklessness and the fact that he was so pretty that he turned everything around himself into a movie soothed me. I knew how these things went; I did not have to worry about permanence. All I had to do was go along for the ride.

I’m not sure whether to be wistful or relieved that there hasn’t been a solid boy-with-car situation in my life for a few years now. My last boyfriend had one, but he doesn’t like to drive and lacks, mercifully, that romantic outlaw quality that makes for what I used to consider a good driver. If he is any evidence, it would seem that I am ready to slow down a little and take in the scenery from a more stable point of reference. By my own rules, though, boyfriends don’t count for this sort of thing. The boy has to be a not-my-boyfriend, has to be willing to work without return, and the conversation has to be tense and hormonal. And the simple fact is that unless I want to take up with someone much younger than myself, these boys have all grown up. Which makes me think that it is high time I grew up myself.

My risks have already been considerable, if prosaic enough. It’s worth noting that I have never found these risks more dangerous than the one I would take by learning how to drive myself. I worry about being my own kind of bad driver–a nervous, joyless one who slows down at approaching curves in the road and keeps the music low so they can concentrate. I worry that even this won’t save me from accidents, disaster, death. I worry that I will be one of those people who never truly feels comfortable behind the wheel. But mostly, I worry about my potential passengers. How will I ever keep them happy?

The carpet undulated in little ripples of apricot and ivory. Andee and I were slave girls of the great pharaoh languidly reclining on the royal barge. The pharaoh was fondling James. (It was going to be a very tactile trip.)

We trailed our feet over the edge of the bed into the madder red ruby rosettes of the carpet. Indigo petals floated by like lily pads randomly bearing tiny detached heads of people I had known. I could now read our Persian-Kurdish rug in a way I had never been able to before. It was a mythological map of Samarkand with interlacing arabesques of mechanical peacocks, saffron pavilions, orchards and gardens and cypress trees.

We lived these lives a thousand years ago as courtesans, as opium-eaters at the court of the Kubla Khan. We had drunk of the milk of Paradise and its transforming liquidity made us all quite porous. There were no boundaries where Alph the sacred river ran. No genders, no time and space. We simply sparkled and vibrated. We were all pulsating little Bodhisattvas. I was in love with everybody. Actually, I was everybody.

–From “Faithfull: An Autobiography” by Marianne Faithfull with David Dalton

The thing I’ve always liked about drugs, hallucinogens in particular, is that you don’t actually have to be Marianne Faithfull to experience this sort of imaginative bliss when you take them. The fauxriental rug you got on sale at Marshall’s will work just as well as the real thing as far as undulation is concerned. Your friends will still feel like fellow slave girls and pharaohs regardless of the fact that they are not in or connected to any famous rock bands. The porous sensation resulting from a long draught of the milk of Paradise is the same whether you’re a college student or a sheik’s wayward nephew. Drugs are cheap, democratic, and work just as well on just about anyone who wishes to take them. Spending your whole life on them and having things turn out more or less okay is another story: that’s pretty much reserved for rock royalty only.

The same could be said about Christian Dior’s Addict, a narcotic potion available at almost any department store and priced at an equal-opportunity $42 for 20 ml. Addict sets the stage well for its particular amazing journey: it opens on a wonderfully weird green note that somehow carries all the mysterious dry tang of hash as well as the sensation of being in some dark primeval forest. This green note is not necessarily nice, in fact, on the wrong day it can be downright disturbing. It has elements of bitterness and dust that hold true throughout most of the perfume’s progression, never allowing the wearer to forget that what they are experiencing is not something everyone will want to experience. Then a deep, dark, syrupy vanilla thick enough to drown a woolly mammoth burbles up from the depths, enveloping the green notes and pulling them down into a deadly quicksand of amber and sandalwood. The effect is rich with all the acute fascination and heightened sensual impulses of an afternoon spent in front of an Oriental carpet with your mind blown and your body alternately strong and weak against its will.

It is difficult, when wearing Addict, not to be transported–I would like to meet the woman who wears this to work. It’s strength is such that even one spray leaves it clinging to a sweater until a visit to the local dry-cleaner is made, and its dense sillage makes it practically impossible to wear without drawing comments. Like drugs, once you get down with Addict, you have crossed definitively to the other side–the fun side, where all the bad kids hang out. The problem with this side is the chance that you could actually become an addict–a slave to your senses, existing only to experience an artificial thrill that has somehow become more important to you than actually living. Here’s the difference, though: this state is far more safely experienced with a perfume than an actual drug. I would venture that this something upon which Dior’s advertising executives, if not Marianne Faithfull, would probably agree.

“Here, put on some eyeliner. Eyeliner makes everything better,” Heather told me once. I don’t remember what we were doing or why I needed to feel better, but I know that she pulled a black pencil out of her purse and handed it to me. This would have been a few years ago, when we hadn’t been friends for very long yet and certain dead-serious things she did and said still struck me with all the comedic poignancy of realizing yet another fundamental difference between us. But I took the pencil. I went into the bathroom. I put it first on my top lid, then, boldly, applied it to my bottom lid as well. In my present-tense reenactment of this scene, I am wearing a red Lacoste polo shirt and a pair of ripped up jeans, the sort of outfit that does not lend itself to glamorous makeup. I turn my face from side to side in the mirror, checking for some sort of improvement. Then I start laughing at both Heather and myself for believing that eyeliner made anything better, much less everything. And suddenly, I do feel better.

I remembered her advice this morning, or rather, this afternoon when I finally got myself out of the pajamas it feels like I’ve been wearing all week. After much deliberation, I situated myself in front of the bathroom mirror. “I’ll just put a little foundation on so I don’t feel like a leper in case I go out,” I told myself. The foundation led to blusher which led to eyebrow gel and mascara which led to finding myself strangely reluctant to put on the eyeliner that would finish off my routine. The reasoning went something like this: “Unemployed, unloved, undistinguished people with no friends and no resources and no personality with which to get them who aren’t going to do anything with their lives anyway do not deserve eyeliner. Besides, I might cry.” Then I realized that if I did cry, no one would be around to see it anyway, so I might as well just put the eyeliner on. I did. It looked pretty. If I have learned nothing else in this life, I have learned that being pretty never hurts. Even if it’s just for your computer.

There’s this haunting scene in Rebecca Wells’ popular book “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood” where the school-aged protagonist, Sidda, opens the house to a door-to-door cosmetics saleswoman, Lizzie Mitchell. Sidda‘s mother, Vivi, is upstairs in the throes of a long depression. When Sidda goes upstairs and wakes Vivi up, Vivi unsurprisingly instructs Sidda to turn Lizzie away. Sidda says that she can’t. When Vivi asks why not, Sidda says, “Because, she’s got on the wrong color lipstick.” This is a crisis that Vivi understands. She goes downstairs in her bathrobe to meet Lizzie and the two women fix each other up with the help of the elite Beautiere line of cosmetics. This is both the beginning of Vivi’s recovery and Lizzie’s formerly stunted career. It also made me bawl my face off when I read it. There is something so undeniably true about the idea that your surface and your inner life exist in symbiosis. And that when you truly need to fix yourself up, it’s best to start small. A little look in the mirror, a little eyeliner, a little effort.

So, stupid fucking hippie-ass LUSH had this buy-one-get-one-free sale just as I was about to swear them off forever. I am ashamed to say that this flagrant tactic to make me spend more money there worked and that I’m back on the wagon. This is the last time, though. I swear.

A brief synopsis of my shame:

Silky Underwear Dusting Powder: My mom wouldn’t let me have any silky underwear when I was a kid. She said they were bad for my vagina. Now, as an adult, my thoughts of silky underwear have this interestingly decadent tinge of poor hygiene and all the exciting girls who practice it. To this day, I still don’t think I own a pair. This is why I like LUSH’s version. As long as I don’t, you know, put any up in there, it can’t possibly be bad for my vagina. Decadent, though? Exciting? Well… yes. It’s a little clumpy, due to the tiny slivers of cocoa butter designed to make it silkier than the average body powder, but that doesn’t bother me. What does bother me is the packaging, a lamely constructed cardboard shaker that makes it difficult to get the right amount into your hand. I’ll put up with that for the scent. LUSH says jasmine and vetiver, I say silky-sweet and intimate. It’s the kind of thing that makes you want to lick your skin after using because you’re certain it will taste as good as it smells.

Butterball Bath Ballistic: This one’s a little guy who gets the tub all greasy, due to a high content of moisturizing cocoa butter. It smells like cocoa butter too, mixed with some vanilla and possibly sandalwood. Overall, this didn’t freak me out either way. Much like that movie In Her Shoes, I enjoyed it without ever needing to repeat the experience.

Alkmaar Soap: I pretty much bought this because I’ve just been to Amsterdam and feel very worldly for knowing that Alkmaar is a little town nearby notorious for its cheese and (legal!) hookers. I wanted to visit while I was there, but unfortunately, there seemed to be some strange substance in the air that made me lazy. Anyway, this soap is as rich and creamy as a hunk of cheese, and being scented with the same gorgeous stuff used in Silky Underwear, made my skin red-light ready in no time.

Karma Bubble Bar: My relationship with Karma perfume is one of uncomfortable fascination. I want to like it, but its high concentration of essential oils (strangely, one of the very reasons other people seem to like it so much) made me feel like I’d just come from single’s night at Whole Foods. As a perfume, Karma and I didn’t get along. As a bubble bar, however, I was in orange-patchouli bliss. Strongly scented, it filled the whole house with its rock-n-roll-groupie, designer-yoga-pants vibe. To my pleasure, it also turned the water orange and bubbled up like a bottle of Tide in someone else’s parents’ jacuzzi.

Sex Bomb Bath Ballistic: Hey, did somebody say sex? Because, you know, that’s my beat. I’m not happy unless there’s some pulsing techno coming out of the speakers and something that says sex in the immediate vicinity. Even so, I was less than stoked about Sex Bomb. It turns the water mauve and smells mildly rosy-floral. There is also some gross gelatinous flower thing involved that floats around in the water, attaching itself to parts of your body until you finally throw it at a wall… where it sticks. Yeah, call me a pervert, but this is not the kind of sex I’m into.

Honey Bee Bath Bomb: This one can eat me. It makes the bottom of the tub all gritty and painful (Rhassoul mud, anyone?), smells mildly of citrus honey for about two minutes, and leaves you sitting in a pool of water that looks like you can’t control your bladder. Not just this one time, but generally.

Creamy Candy Bath Melt: Looks like a darling little bar of Turkish Delight, smells like an oozing vat of nougat, and makes the bath water nice and slippery. What’s not to like? I’m into cocktailing this one with my Karma bubble bar right now.

Tramp Shower Gel: I went into LUSH because I wanted to bathe deliberately, to cram only the essential products into my basket, and see if I could not buy what it had to sell, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had missed out on something really incendiary in the world of expensive bath possibilities. If I had not bought Tramp, things probably would have been okay. It’s dark green and smells like patchouli and herbs, although not as strongly as some of their other bath products. I gave it to a friend.

All That Jas Bath Ballistic: Here’s a haiku for y’all: Turns the water teal. Smells like some pretty flowers. I have been suckered.

American Cream Conditioner: I’ve been trying to get away from silicone products for my hair recently, or at least to not use so many of them. This one was appealing to me for that reason, as well as the tales people on the internet like to spin of its incredible ambrosial scent. I had to wait three whole days to use it after I bought it because I don’t wash my hair very often. When I did, I found that it sank right in and rinsed clean with little effort on my part; two things I like in a conditioner. Also, the smell was pretty incredible. Rich, earthy vanilla with a little kick of spice. I didn’t find it so strong that I could go without perfume for the day, as I’d read on some of the beauty boards. But I did find that it makes my hair soft, smooth, and pretty, which is something my prior conditioner was not doing. Like it. Like it a lot.

Two of my friends, Heather and Crazy Ange, were talking on the phone one day. This was maybe two years ago. “What did you do all day, Crazy Ange?” asked Heather.

“Well,” she said, “I dyed my hair and shaved my legs and plucked my eyebrows and painted my toenails and whitened my teeth and then I waited for the man to come and kill me.”

It struck me, both at the time I heard this story and also last night as I was applying special tea tree cream to my feet before putting them into fuzzy socks which I had heated on the radiator, that I am not unfamiliar with this exact feeling.

To be fair, the Nord Hotel in Paris isn’t so bad during the day. That’s it in the picture. Possibly even the same room I stayed in. When you turn the light on and open the window, the yellow shade of the walls looks almost sunny and inviting. There are little individually-wrapped mints on the pillows and a sign instructing you to drop any towels you want washed on the floor so that the cleaning service doesn’t go to the trouble of washing the clean ones, too. A TV mounted in the corner of the room, near the ceiling. Sure, it’s a little shabby, but no worse than a hostel, and fuck it, you just got into Paris and lucked into a cheap hotel right across the street from the train station.

I didn’t think anything of it when I dropped my bags off in the afternoon. I am also in the complicated groove of traveling by myself, a state in which everything is experienced acutely and then hovers around in a space of its own, completely independent from the sort of value judgments I’d be making if I had the resources for comparison. It’s all new, and therefore all the same to me in this regard: the photos of women having sex with animals in the Sex Museum in Amsterdam, the insectlike curve of a door handle in the Art Nouveau district in Brussels, the beer coasters lined decoratively around the bars that never seem to be used for their intended purposes, the muscular and omnipresent tongue of the Italian guy I kissed after going out for Chinese food, the awkward but euphoric conversations held between people who can’t really speak each other’s languages well enough to do much except express happiness at meeting… all of it has been definitively foreign, and I’ve gotten used to my independent opinions pretty much stopping at that. I do not feel any added anxiety bringing a small supply of hash with me on the train out of Amsterdam because I am anxious enough about making the train in the first place. I am far more worried about radiation poison from accidentally passing my hand through the baggage X-ray machine than I am about going into a bar by myself and picking up a strange man. Nothing makes any sense; it’s all just a heady rush of information and adrenaline. I can’t yet tell what I will remember and what I will forget, and this doesn’t bother me yet. It feels pleasantly weightless to focus on small, sensory details as they’re happening.  

“I am more than happy to have you make all the decisions for awhile,” is what I told Aaron when I met him in the lobby of the Nord Hotel in Paris, upon seeing him for the first time in almost two years. I mean this. My jeans are already hanging off me from the stress of doing everything for myself. I am exhilarated, sure, but my hands are also shaking and I’ve spent so much time alone that I’m not far from a point where conversations with myself will start to happen out loud. Furthermore, Aaron is the kind of person who likes to take care of things. He’s good at it. If I characteristically never quite know what to do, he always does. Even when he’s stoned.

When we got back to the Nord Hotel that first night, I washed my face in the bathroom while he sat at the tiny desk next to it, rolling a joint with the hash I brought from Amsterdam. I came out of the bathroom and pulled down the bedspread, revealing a velour blanket and scratchy grayish sheets. I didn’t want to get into it but I did, pulling the blanket up tightly over my knees and staring at the blinking red light on the TV set in the corner. Earlier, Aaron discovered that the door didn’t really lock. An old-building thing; the parts of the lock just weren’t in close enough alignment to work. When he was finished rolling the joint, he dragged the desk chair over and propped it up in front of the door. It wasn’t tall enough to jam it, but at least there would be something in the way if someone tried to come in. The carpets looked like they’d been subjected to repeated flooding. So did the walls, actually: the textured burgundy wallpaper was pulling up in some sections as though the entire room had been full of murky brown water at some point. Maybe with some bodies floating in it. The parts that weren’t covered with this wallpaper were painted a malignant egg-yolk yellow. Plus, it just felt empty. It wasn’t hard to imagine being shut up inside this hotel and forgotten. It was the kind of place someone might go to arrange a drug deal, seduce a teenager, or hole up for an anonymous, long-term bender.

Aaron takes his clothes off and gets into bed in his shorts, the joint he’s just rolled perched on the rim of the ashtray he has brought over from the desk. There’s another ashtray next to the bed on my side. He lights the joint and we smoke it. I’m having a hard time knowing what to say to him. I’ve known Aaron since I was thirteen, but the boxer shorts, the hash, and the general trend of multi-layered confusion I’ve experienced in Europe all conspire to make me feel like he is part of the scenery instead of an ally against it. It’s the blinking light on the TV that finally snaps me out of it: “This is so fucking creepy!” I say before launching myself across the bed toward his hopefully familiar armpit, my old favorite hideout. He puts his arms around me and I’m still half-hoping he’s going to tell me I’m being ignorant of European customs or something and that this is all perfectly normal. But: “I know,” he says. “It’s the TV. That’s the worst part.”

“It’s like those stories about the KGB putting cameras in everything.”

“They’re sitting downstairs watching us freak out.” He holds the joint up to my lips and I inhale, knocking ash onto his bare chest. I rub it into his skin with my free hand. I’d envisioned this as more of a bottle-of-wine-and-silk-negligee kind of scene, but we might as well sleaze it up. When at the Nord Hotel…

I wake up at five in the morning to the sounds of a running vacuum and a woman’s ecstatic moans coming from a room that could be down the hall or on another floor entirely. My T-shirt is clammy with sweat, the kind of sweat that makes you cold even while you’re overheating. I’m sort of in disbelief that I’d managed to fall asleep at all. I remember kissing Aaron last night, his feet covering mine under the blankets as we sought to press as much of ourselves up against each other as possible. I remember how he stopped in the middle of it, stopped without pulling away or saying anything, just stopped. “What?” I’d whispered in the dark.

“I’m scared.”

It had been a good thirty seconds before I understood what he meant. And even longer before I realized that this was one of the parts I would remember.