of pebbles, let them drip from her palm. Instantly, her mom yanked her up, slapped her hand, wiped it, yelled, “You’ll get filthy!” I remember feeling gratitude that I was not her, that my mom was letting us play. We played hard. We ran far. Prissy instincts were not indulged.
Then, when I was in first grade, I remember sitting cross-legged on the floor in the cafeteria. I had red tights on—red was my favorite color—and the seam of the crotch was visible. Another girl looked at me blankly.
“Ladies don’t sit like that,” she intoned. “Ladies keep their legs together. That’s what my mom told me.”
And I was grateful again not to have such a mother. And I don’t want to be a mother like that. And I don’t want anyone, ever, telling my daughter to shake her tail. Even if she likes it.
More to the immediate point of why I resisted employment at the Bounce Babe Lounge: I feared that performing sexuality for men would alienate me from my ecstatic and revelatory lust for Carl. And despite the power of this lust, we had enough obstacles. I’d broken up with my college boyfriend soon after he’d come to town, but that house in West Philadelphia was a confusing atmosphere in which to start a heterosexual romance, even if you weren’t two-timing.
The trend toward sex work had fostered a male-female rift in the neighborhood, as the women took to equating men and johns and a couple of them dumped guys they’d been hanging out with. As fresh meat on the scene, my scent attracted both the girls newly interested in their own and the boys and men left hanging by the change-over. With little to do besides sit on the porch and take in the milieu, I accepted compliments and massages from anyone who offered, in keeping with the anything-goes atmosphere. It wouldn’t have been cool for him to voice a complaint, but when Carl came home from work to find me receiving rubs on both my neck and my feet, or lifting up my arm so someone could examine the small tattoo I had near my armpit, he might ignore me for hours. Meanwhile, he was still hung up on a former house resident, and when she came around, he’d turn his his beam on her. We didn’t act much like an overt couple around the pack in any case. We went on a group road trip where we didn’t sleep in the same tent on the first night. We dropped acid together and then he went off to an over-twenty-one joint where I couldn’t follow.
But at some point most every night he’d give me a signal and we’d go up to his room and enter our sex zone. And often enough, we’d sneak off the premises and prowl the city as a pair. We had things in common aside from our desire to abrade our bodies against each other’s. A secret hankering for greasy pizza and fountain Cokes to relieve the house diet of vegan stir-fry, for one thing. A preference for the kind of dirty guitar rock just starting to be put out by Sub Pop Records over the thrashier, hardcore stuff of Alternative Tentacles, for another, along with a belief in the totemic power of record label names. And we both came from small town upbringings that left us with a bit of gee-whiz when our guards dropped.
Mostly what we had in common was a desire to explore the metropolis by foot. We liked to walk, and we crisscrossed the city—from the dilapidated industrial sites on the West Side, to posh Rittenhouse Square in Center City, to the Historic District farther east. We were all the way down at Penn’s Landing the night he brought up the road trip that’d been in the air: He and three other guys had been plotting to pile in Mel’s truck and head to San Francisco to visit Joe, a popular housemate who’d made the move west a few months back. The departure date had been set for two weeks out. But if I wanted to, he told me, he’d ditch the ride, and he and I could take the thousand bucks he’d saved from his job as a laborer and we could hitchhike there together. We wouldn’t rush madcap; we’d stop for adventures. We’d crash with friends of friends. We’d go camping. He’d always wanted to hike in the Rockies. He’d spent some seasons backpacking in the Adirondacks, and he had all the gear.
We’d go on the road, is what I heard. On the Road On the Road On the Road.
“Yes!” I said. Of course I said yes. As soon as the words were out of his mouth I believed I’d orchestrated my entire summer, my entire romantic history, my entire life, exactly for this. Over the next couple of days, as we proved our sincere intentions—Carl told the other guys he wasn’t going with them, and I told Reba and my parents our plan—we couldn’t stop grinning at each other like a couple of excited kids.
THIS PERFECT ACCORD didn’t last long. Before we even left, we reverted back to being guarded and sly when we were out of bed, suspicious of each other’s motives. Perhaps this was justifiable, given the dynamics. I was beholden to Carl in many aspects. He was older, bigger, male, more established amongst the crowd we ran in. He carried the cash, the know-how, the sexual prowess; I needed these things from him, and I didn’t like feeling needy. It made me defensive. He also had moods that dwarfed my own, and he was not above using both his strengths and his weaknesses as a way to draw me in, bind me tighter. He wanted a dedicated mate, one without an expiration date, and although I was besotted with him, even subservient to him in ways, we were both aware that in all our adventures, he was not only my leader/lover but also my temporary prop. I had dreamed of traveling the country, and I knew how impossible it would be to do on my own. I was checking something off a list, and the next item on it would send me to England alone for a year abroad. Carl, however addictive the orgasms, however aesthetic his skills and his sorrows, was my love object but also the means for an American adventure that had to be completed by a deadline.
I had read, by this time, not only On the Road but also Minor Characters, by Joyce Johnson, who’d been Jack Kerouac’s girlfriend during the period when his fame peaked. My dad’s editor had sent me the memoir when he told her how entranced I was by the Beats, and I devoured it. I related to Joyce Johnson mightily, a bookish, middle-class girl called early toward the margins of culture. Starting at the age of thirteen, in 1949, she slipped out of her bourgeois apartment to go down to Greenwich Village in search of Real Life.
“Real life was sexual,” she wrote. “Or rather, it often seemed to take the form of sex. This was the area of ultimate adventure, where you could dare or not dare.”
I admired her. I recognized how much bravery it’d taken to move out of her parent’s house and live alone as a single young woman at a time when few others did. How fashionably prescient she’d been to seek out opaque black tights from a dancer’s supply store when garters, nylons, and white gloves were de rigueur.
I also felt aggrieved on Johnson’s behalf and on behalf of all those with whom I shared a gender. The shame she had to undergo during her risky abortion. The mockery she endured as an ambitious female dreamer. I understood—as likely was my dad’s editor’s intent—that there were reasons beyond the individual why a woman hadn’t written a Beat ode as similarly exuberant as On the Road. Johnson recounts how an English professor at the all-girls college Barnard introduced a course by asking how many of the students wanted to be authors. The class was required of creative writing majors, and, confused by a question whose answer was self-evident, all the young women slowly raised their hands.
The professor said he was sorry to see this. “First of all, if you were going to be writers, you wouldn’t be enrolled in this class. You couldn’t even be enrolled in school. You’d be hopping freight trains, riding through America.”
The thoughts of eighteen-year-old Sylvia Plath would seem to corroborate this writerly inclination. In a journal entry from 1951 she tells of her “consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors, and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording . . . to sleep in an open field, to travel West, to walk freely at night.” But she can’t. “I am a girl, a female, always in danger of assault.”
“Received wisdom of 1953,” wrote Johnson of her
