Tiffany Scandal - Jigsaw Youth

The bleached sheets make our knees and elbows raw. Purple streaks from the dye, everywhere my head touches the bed. I’ve never wanted you more. You’re sure housekeeping will think you killed a ton of grapes.

Sometimes it feels like I’m always crying in the back of taxis.

SEA

We talk about spending time by the water. You want to get a hotel room and explore a place neither of us call home. Marvel at its complicated layout. Being vegan in a city that loves fish, we anticipate finding a grocery store and stocking up on hummus and vegetables. How hunting for coffee will the only reason to ever leave our room. But Seattle never happens.

This wasn’t living — this was dreaming.

The work intervenes.

Or I’m too focused on what’s happening in my scene.

Months pass and we talk about Seattle again.

It never happens.

And I never see you again.

I’ll love you now and forever .

Feet on concrete, I look up to the clouds and wonder if you’re doing the same. Your presence, a ghost, touches my shoulder and reminds me that it’s time to move on. Manhattan. Boston. Altanta. Memories play like the sweetest of dreams.

Goodnight.

Onstage she was “Jackie-Oh!” (and yes, the exclamation point was necessary). Friends called her Jack or Jackie. But paperwork always had her as Lucy, a person that no longer resembled who she was, a girl from Charlottesville, Virginia. Lucy was the daughter of a child-diddling Baptist minister and a subservient, god-fearing mother. The stage’s red lights blurred any scarring or bruises you might otherwise have noticed. Jack didn’t like the red lights because they made her “look better,” but because they helped her continue to feel different. Because she could be flawless, there. She still got self-conscious when she was intimate with someone, something the wash of red inhibited. When Portishead’s “Wandering Star” began, she tuned everything out, mouthing the word “Power” to the rhythm of it. She ran away when she was fifteen because she was angry. It was easy to blame the things that happened at home. Her father often punished her for sinning, entering her room when the mother was out for groceries or in bed late at night, pressing the good book against young Lucy’s face with one hand while the other lifted her gown. That her mother called her lies the devil’s work, and accused her of trysts with neighborhood boys. But really, it was having a voice around no one that could hear it. Onstage, she was an idea that couldn’t be touched unless she let it. She’d stare men and women in the eye and dare them to look away. All this without saying anything. Jackie-Oh! was an athlete, working the pole with expert agility, spinning and dancing, walking upside down to the ceiling on the strength of her arms. When she slid back down, she hit the stage hard enough that everyone looked up. She teased what everyone had come to see, lowering and raising what little covered her, making them wait. Don’t call her a stripper, she didn’t dance; she was a performer.

Every now and then when she caught herself doing something Lucy would do, she told herself she was Jack. Most of the places she cut were covered in tattoos. This was someone else’s story now, she’d remind herself.

Jack had moved to Portland on a whim — she’d never been before.

She had divided what little she had on an Amtrak ticket and her wallet. Two hundred dollars to last her as long as it could, hopefully long enough to find work out there. When the countryside along the tracks began to change, she felt awe, never having left the eastern coast before.

She got a job as a social worker, at a residential facility for at-risk young women. Her role was in teaching them coping skills, something they’d never taught her at the church her father told the word. While the work was rewarding, she wasn’t making enough to support herself, even at fifty hours. After commiserating with people she’d met, and listing the things she was good at, she decided to audition at a couple clubs. As Lucy, she’d been pushed by her father to excel, at sports, at ballet. She’d been in beauty pageants as a child, her mother’s pride. An only child, she was both a son and a daughter. It took a few tries before she got offered the day shift, each time reworking her set, and she made more in four hours than she had in three days as a social worker, so she quit that job.

And like many who come to Portland, Jack was also an artist. She liked to deconstruct salvaged china dolls and old computer parts, make them into something new. For a while, she was dating the bassist of a well-known punk band. She’d picked up a few things, even got good at it. That’s actually how we met, when she answered an ad. I recognized her immediately. I’d seen her perform.

It wasn’t long before she got promoted to nights, weekends, and started to gain the attention of regulars with the exposure. They’d be there, always willing to pay for the show, even when she had sets at other clubs. What she made in a month at even her best paying job she started to make in a night. Somehow exposing your tits was more valuable than helping people in trouble. And she missed social work, because there was a satisfaction in making a difference for people whose stories were often too similar to hers.

I watched her move now, twisting glitter, the way stars move over time, thinking how she’d told me stripping made her more confident. How she loved to dance to songs by Sonic Youth, Bikini Kill, Sleater-Kinney, whatever else. How she used to hate her body, thought her vagina was too big, her tits too small. And when she was a teenager she’d compare her body to naked women in movies and magazines. They were all so perfect it must have meant she was defective. But now she loved her “voluptuous labia” and “itty, bitty titties,” as she’d put it, in a way that sounded convincing enough to me.

A few days later, it was Christmas eve. The city was dormant, with so many transplants off for the holidays, and because she didn’t have a family to visit, and I couldn’t afford to leave, we decided to spend the holidays together. That whole thing about your friends being the family you get to choose. I found a shitty tree and some decorations at a Dollar Store, and she brought over treats and the supplies with which to decorate them. We listened to old mixtapes and burned through joints. We drew tits and dicks and cunts, and wrote words like “fuck” and “fart,” on the glass ball ornaments with glue pens and glitter. We started to kill a bottle of whiskey and talk about the band, scumbags we’d encountered, songs we wanted to write. .

“I never got to tell him off.”

“Who?”

“My sperm donor.”

“Your dad?”

“I wanted to be something in spite of him.”

“But you are. You’re a well-known performer. You’re strong and independent. I admire the hell out of you.”

She started to blush.

“I wish I could move like you do.” I took another swig from the bottle.

Jack leaned in close, put her hand over mine as she grabbed for the whiskey. She took a swig inches from my face, and whispered, “I can teach you.”

We lit candles and set them around her in a circle, and turned off the lights. I was sitting on the floor, continuing to drink straight from the bottle. Jack fished a mixtape out of her bag that was decorated with rainbow stars and a unicorn. Put it in the cassette deck and rewound it. The song that came on was Babes In Toyland’s “Catatonic.” She started to dance, smiling at me, but the way she was looking it wasn’t empty — she saw me. Jack spun, bent down, fell, covering her face with her hair. Clawing at her clothes. Lit by fire, she looked like she was performing some lost, primitive ritual.