My Stockings and I
MY STOCKINGS AND I
It was at a party on the eve of New Year 1987, that I came face to face with the accepted repentance of my long suffered purgatory, the potential loss of my virginity. I saw him and went in auto drive. Palpitations shimmed down my breasts and burst open in my pants. Every erogenous zone popped simultaneously and in multiple. I felt like toxic malt in a liquor factory as I bubbled and sizzled in his presence. I adored him through lemon tinted specs as he swaggered over to the buffet table, I felt bitter sweet submission to his taut tanned hands as he leant over for the potato salad. Mania dictated that I strip completely naked and throw myself on sausage spick and howl: “Eat me. I’m here!" That thought was soon walloped down when an and equally manic thought arrived and a crazier voice had taken over its loudspeaker chanting in my head:
“The room is full of other women!” It bellowed: “they are over there and over there and over there! Other women that are better dressed more eloquent and damn more sexy than you are!” then just add a feverish point to it’s bellowing it squealed: “Women who are NOT virgins.”
I was a pirate, adrift within the swollen sea. My ship was bashed across the rocks and was plummeting in the icy ocean. Lost, fearful in the unforgiving water, stranded and alone, I was ready to fight, ready to defend and primed for the attack. I would have shouted out for help but for being completely strangled by esoteric rope around my throat which was choking me on my own woven bile.
In a panic and screening for potential competition I scanned the room. There were only three others that may have been some meager competition. I noticed with some relief that skinny jeans was not one of them. Skinny jeans was incapable of fighting for Tin Tin tonight, she was getting drunk with an ugly boy, she was laughing too loudly and giving head to a cheap bottle of cider:
: " You all sorted then? " I winked.
She smiled at me and I smiled back and gave her one last salute:
" It is the charlie perfume " I mouthed and gave confirmatory thumbs up.
It was on that night that I understood that girls are better liers than boys when it comes down to the fact that one has not yet lost their virginity. I was a virgin; even if I gave the impression that I was not. It is now my belief, with hindsight and the wisdom of my years that most of my friends were also virgins. You could never have known that at the time though as girls would not own up to it incase the boy thought she was too frigid to date and the boy never owned up to it because he believed he was losing his virginity:
“any day now mate” anyway.
I had to get his attention. I scattered through the files in my mind, scrutinizing every one at light speed. Every film, book and radio show I had ever read, seen or heard in my entire life was retrieved and dusted. Within thirty seconds I had the file I needed. It was a film, a musical extravaganza the definitive work on all that was romance and the art of love: Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. That had to work! I had no time to lose. HE was ever nearing and the closeness of his gasp was ever sweet. The scent of his skin filled the air and I drank with great gulps the pheromones from the crystal goblet that surrounded him. At fever pitch I snapped open the top two buttons of my A-line blouse and as his hand reached once more towards the potato salad so my own reached for a cocktail sausage. His plastic spoon bent and scooped the creamy clotted substance on to his plate and as it did so I pounced on him. Pushing my chest into his face, I bit into the sausage and in an attempt at an American, Hollywood American, accent, drawled:
" Can I interest yaw in anythin' pardner? " he looked me up and down, beamed broadly and that was that.
He offered me a drink from his can of Caffreys and munching on cheesy Ritz, we made ourselves comfortable on the top stairs. I told him my name, and about my part time job in Kentucky fried chicken:
“Sounds shit " he belched and went on to talk about himself. He was twenty, he worked in a nightclub and his name was Jason.
His name was Jason and I was sat on the staircase to paradise, my dreams had busted out from my slumbered state and had hot rodded, away into the sphere named reality. My virgin frustrations had boiled and sizzled and like bees wax melted and molded my carnal desires into a purer form which was flesh and flesh can be felt and oh how I felt him. I felt him both inside and out. I had given him form and he was mine. As he spoke his words were a dove, swooping and gliding and resting upon my heart. As he laughed his face was a Picasso, colour, form, life and distortion that made perfect sense when taken for just what it was, uninhibited and free. I wanted be one with him and fly with him and laugh and hug him so tight that I could've screamed:
I am in love, I AM IN LOVE! And then he spoke:
" What school did you go to? " he asked.
" A comprehensive " I replied.
" Comprehensive girl are you? Not me. I 'm a grammar boy. I dropped out of Uni. I don’t fancy being the intelligentsia for the establishment all my life. I'm working class now with brains. You have got to have brains to get by. I ask you, who was the most stupid person in the world? I'll tell you! Kennedy. Kennedy had power and looks and money but he couldn’t have had very many brains. If he had had brains then he would have hired himself a stand in and been able to save his head, instead of wall papering that birds face with his brains, see? he would still have been alive right now. Jesus aswell, now he was one hell of a stupid guy. God even warned him of what was going to happen to him and he still walked right into it. Judas though, he had some brains. He made a right nice tidy earner aswell. If you never miss a trick then you got brains. Tricks means saving your ass and a rich man that is dead is only a dead once rich man "
I nodded barely understanding but mesmerized by his tongue moving up and down his lips.
" Well the government knows it’s all about earners. If I wasn’t an anarchist I might have joined the government. I see it this way, they try to segregate us grammars and you comps because they don’t want us brains and your beauty mixing. It will germ up the genes see. It don’t matter now anyway because no ones got a job now; it’s only the top guys that really get the jobs. It is disgusting leaving a human man on the dole like that, stripping him of his manly worth. Now women they are all right, at least they got the babies to keep them occupied. I work in a nightclub.”
" Oh sure, I mean you must get to learn a lot about life in a nightclub.” I stammered and gulped
My face blushed and my blood pressure gushed as my spirit pulled it's self away from my body. G force stretched my lust like an elastic band as it pinged with the shame of my ignorance. Jason was going to talk about sex! Ok he never said sex but I had never been in a nightclub and to me working in a nightclub must be raw pumping sex! Shamed, I tried to retrieve the files I had on sex. Nothing, just a meager folder marked health care and an image of a Barbie and Ken doll.
I wanted to talk to Jason about sex; I wanted to talk about sex on that staircase. I ached to free myself of the chastity of my ignorance intact but at the same time it was comfortable to feel so tight and so bound. That bound up comfort that resembled a baby wrapped tight in a blanket in its mother’s arms. Then instantly, I was aware that I would have the blankets torn from me and that made me feel uncomfortable, very uncomfortable. The cheesy biscuits baked hard and dry on to my tongue, choking me as they built a mountain that my breath could not scale. My saliva that was once an ocean became a drought and a residue of salt was left encrusted deep into the ravines of my mouth. I was choking, fighting for a life between my innocence and raw sexuality.
Although I had emerged into a world that had already promoted free love and freedom of sexuality, I was still inhibited. I had been emancipated from the shackles of the gag acts and signed petitions against using makeup on animals but I had not yet freed my virginity. I had the pill stuffed firmly into my pants draw and I would gaze at it daily dreaming of the day I might consume it but I had not yet tasted it. The pill, that sweet tab. You just drop it with lemon and feel the fear but do it anyway. The pill, the key from the jail of abortions that soap box of doctrines that declares libertarian shafting. Tongues in mouths and not on heads as sperm swims freely to its death and not mine. I needed to taste that pill. I wanted to inject myself with that chemical love until I bloated with poison and become, through intravenous effort, that type of girl.
I was not that type of girl. I was a nice girl, the stable marrying kind of girl that enjoyed nothing more than pin curling my hair like aunty and out witting the neighbors wife by buying the first double glazing. I was the kind of girl that men wanted to protect and buy blenders for on her birthday. I am the type of girl celebrated by future generations for my virginal piety. (Hypocrisy I can stand but piety I detest) I wanted to be a nice girl, who, although flirted with men in courtship was never left in a bath with knitting needles and gin. Sex was for marriage and the alternative bought blood clots, VD and death.
I didn't want to be nice girl, I wanted to be more than her. I wanted to be earth girl and have swinging breasts. I wanted to walk the streets with my breasts flopping out all over the place. Men would die sighing: " sexy chest. " and then faint from the sheer sight of me swinging like a metronome, hustling and bustling my form down the street. My bust swinging heavy, flapping on my bulbous midriff, a bust that belonged to the sexy girl. That was the type of girl that I wanted to be: a sexy girl, a stunning, sexy symbol. I wanted to be a girl that was constantly engaged on a booty call.
I didn't want to die wasting away through virginity. I could picture the doctors saying over my dead body
" Vagina? "
" Shriveled "
" Good. "
"Such a sexy girl, what a shame she died shriveled"
.
" Yeah and she had a great set of knockers."
" Yes doctor, a great set of knockers now on their way to heaven. "
" Yes heaven has a place for girls like her. "
I didn't want to be ashamed of my own sexuality, tucking it away daily in a cross over bra, both of which, might I add cause severe bleeding from prickly heat. I wanted to be lusted after like those women in the magazines.
I wanted to be dirty.
Cleanliness or dirt, what's the difference? One washes in the morning the other morning and night.
Cleanliness and dirt, both pelting the brains out of each other on that staircase to damnation.
And there I was with Gabrielle on the stairway to Hell.
" Y' see men take no shit.” he said: “ They're masters of their own destiny, they can be mean and keen shagging machines if they like. Then in between slurps he added:
“Are you on the pill? "
I nodded. I wasn't technically on the pill. I had it in my pants draw sure, but what was it doing there? And what is its real function? Was it my emancipation from the burdens of my mother’s age or was it Jason's emancipation from the burdens of his fathers?
I decided to cough and ignore his question.
He ignored my cough.
He said: " Of course, in my job you get to see a lot of women and you realize that men and women are fundamentally different. Women are an extension of mens' ribs. Men are always ready for it. Women shouldn’t be slappers though but ready anyway like those women in the magazines but preferably with Monroe's tits. Monroe tits and....? " He thought for a while before adding " Stockings, they wear stockings in a nightclub. Stockings are essential and red lipstick, or just nothing at all with just stockings on if they like. " Then he laughed, raised his can and swirled it, he looked inside it took another swig and said:
" In these days of female emancipation a woman can choose for herself which. Infact, stockings are enough really. In stockings a woman is a woman one hundred per cent. " Then as an after thought of his plateau phase he added, "I bet you will look great in stockings"
I learnt a lot on that New Years Eve, the New Years Eve and understood none of it. It didn't seem to matter though because as the next weeks flew by I gradually learnt that to wear stockings was all that mattered in being a woman. I thought that all the most desired women in the world must have worn stockings. It was their secret, one, which they had guarded through history. The angel Gabrielle had told me so himself and in doing so revealed the secret of my existence. Stockings separated women from the rest of the female sex. I guessed that Bodecia, Joan of Arc, Pandora and even Mary, Mother of Christ herself must have smoothed on those silky stockings and protected themselves from frigidity and rejection and secured a place in the world of immortality. All had flaunted their mystique and yet secured the secret in their plastic chastity belts and carried on pretending to be just like me, just like other mortal virgin females
I did not respond that I had no stockings, I just smiled instead.
I saw a lot of Jason in the two months following that New Years Eve. We would stroll through the park or sit in the graveyard discussing life and death and any other matter that was a threat to teenagers thrill seeking nature. Jason became my first real boyfriend and he breathed life into to my constricted lungs. I wanted being wanted to last. I wanted the days to be never ending; the thought of the darkness after the light scared me. It was the fear I had felt as a child, when, as I heard my mother climb the stairs, I knew the day was over, and that security of her arms were gone and may never return. I would count sheep clutching my Barbie doll in the blackness and pray to sleep until I woke and daylight returned.
I felt in my heart that if Jason ever climbed the stairs I would never wake again.
On Valentines Day of that year, Jasons' love for me was declared in the form of a chain. I was disappointed that it was not a ring but Jason declared:
" We are too much in love to get married and engaged and all that prehistoric sixties and seventies crap. This is the eighties, a new generation and a new era and what is marriage anyway if not the shackling of the working class so the bourgeoisie can screw them both at the same time and for half the price? "
And if that was a declaration of love, I accepted it with honour.
During the days we kissed a lot and went to the Bull Ring. The Bull Ring was a place for teenagers that had nowhere else to go and not much else to do but sit on benches encrusted with bird turd and bread crumbs. We met friends and Jason allowed some Japanese tourists to photograph his hair, which he had backcombed into a Gurkha knife style and had sprayed, red. The style was to denote anger and the colour to depict his masculine contempt for all that was rainbow and hippie. The result was a razor sharp red stab in the face. With hair that style one couldn't fail to be noticed and yet it was a statement that only the Japanese seemed to take notice of. I believe now, that they only took photos so that they could gloat when they arrived back home in Japan: " Look at the British, they think they won the war! Ha! Ha! What for? So that they can walk around Britain with a triangular penis on their heads, smoke, drink, sniff glue and vomit on command.”.
I sat with girls that wore ripped stockings and people that could vomit on command and girls that swore a lot and said things like " Stuff em all, stuff ‘em, we ain’t got no future anyway so why not live life. "
Live Life?? We were killing ourselves.
A lot died or committed suicide of the friends I knew then. It’s not surprising, we were handed down mixed messages, and the media was screaming that anything was possible. We had gender swopping, sex changes, and university for the working class. Yuppies had lots of money but we had no money. We had the free market but no market. We could excel but had nothing to excel towards except one place, the bottom of that sweet smelling glue bottle. Music was urban, primal enticing us to riot but there was nothing to riot towards. Even apathy was knackered:
" God save the Queen, A fascist regime “ It was Prols feeding other prols, prol feed. A bunch of facetious kids joining the free market bandwagon and selling out quick before the tax man arrived and then boasting about it later on tv or beside their hotel pool whilst all around desperate teenagers were dying believing their shit. I watched an interview recently with the lead singer of one of those punk bands, probably about fifty eight now and doing nicely by all accounts. The singer started swearing and the interviewer rather than shocked said:
" We all fucking swear these days. " Is that what it was about? A generation of screwed up depressive's just so we can all swear on TV these days?
I wore stockings, ripped ones and chains, more chains than I care to admit, more of the bondage that made me uncomfortable. I sat in stockings listening to Jason and his mates chatter but now I know at the time it was just men crying for men and screwing women at the same time. There was no equal pain, just one-sided gain. Yet Jason was like a dictator that governed my thoughts, beliefs and actions. I would have died for him and death had to be the outcome unless my love was fulfilled with his love.
That valentines day Jason and I had sex for the first time. We went to a pub, got drunk and ate curry sauce and chips on the bus home. When we reached his house no one was in so we went to bed. His arms and the bed were both comfortable and warm. I was wanted, I had been taken, and I was sexy lady with a red-hot inner sanctum. I was a begotten mistress of an erotic host, I was ripe with lust and I was loved. I could never forget that night, the night I first had sex. It was not the act that stands clear in my mind but the feeling. That night I felt that I was grafted onto Jason forever. As we walked the star bright, empty streets, hand in hand, I was disappointed that the world still moved on, that the stars shone and the road still ran and that there were lights in the windows and foxes prowled. The world should have stopped and time ceased forever. But that night something was altered forever because I had changed. I had let a man inside and was no longer one person but two people, Jason and I in just one skin. I groaned with the misery of ever having to say goodbye, he groaned just.... because.
In hindsight I can see that our groans meant different things. I had arrived and he was just leaving. He had only held me in his arms. I had held him in my heart and the two are fundamentally different.
I went to bed dreaming of tomorrow but it never came, I died the morning after. Didn't someone once say that sex brings the little death? I always thought that death was a snubbing out of life but my death was a blast in the heart because Jason did not phone. I tried phoning him for several days without a reply and then gave up and wrote him a letter.
Dear Jason.
I will not regret my taken virginity and will not deny the woman in me. I have given all for your love. All for your cause. I wear stockings.
Your Lover Debs
******
Jason visited me the day after the letter arrived. He said he had given up the streets and had taken up a condensed course studying philosophy and art.
.
" There is all this stuff on form and life and colour. " he said.
" But I love you " I cried " And you never phoned. "
Jason released the laces on his boots and sat down:
" Debs just because we had a shag doesn't mean that we are tied together” and then he added with a sigh and a drag of a cigarette:
" What is love? I mean, whom the Hell knows anyway? Is sex love or is love just designed to make us feel "... he stroked four fingers in the air " as if we have ‘purpose’ in this seemingly meaning less existence?”
Then he started humming all you need is love: "Bollocks, he hummed again “ all you need is two million in the bank and every one will love you. Love as a feeling is dead because it was a cancer and we nuked it. Love is insignificant now, don't you think? "
No! I did not think. I did not bloody well think. If love was insignificant then I was insignificant. I stared at him and for a moment I experienced pure hate. Years later someone said to me that hate was not the opposite of love, but indifference was.
Jason complained: “ You have absolutely no knowledge Debs, you are a simple girl that believes in all that bullshit and you have no rhythm." and he retrieved a tatty copy of N.M.E from his jacket pocket.
"Haven't I? " I said,
" You need to get knowledge and rhythm it will make you sexier when I do you" he smiled " You cant just lie there mute and wiggling your hips as though you have ring worm. You have to move, be sensual, be free and filled with the knowledge of what we are actually fucking doing. Be like musical art a singing picture” Then he stopped, started again and added: “ Did you know that in ancient India a royal couple would have sex on the back of an elephant? "
" Oh sure " I replied as though I knew something, anything that might win his favour.
" Really? " he sneered with a nod towards my vest. I began to take it of:
" then you will also know that it was the slow, heavy gait of the elephant as it trundled along that added to the sensational feeling of sensuality to the pair screwing on its back. "
I fumbled for my own poetic style as I said : " Yes, it was the, erm, swayality of the fat elephantine that did the trick I expect. " and I failed miserably.
Jason threw his leather jacket around my goose like loins and sniffed from a bottle of poppers and began to chant, " sex is rhythm, rhythm is sex, sex is art.”
He was chanting and dancing and gyrating and rubbing his clothed body against my naked own. Then he lay me down, and lying beside me he unzipped his trousers and started jabbing himself harder into my side. Harder and harder as he pushed the bottle up to my nose making me choke on the putrid scent. Gasping and feeling sick, I lay with my body twisted as the room began to spin, for a second there were splashes of form and colour and screaming life, then it all fell silent .
Later on my own I cried. Those second lot of tears were not the same tears that I shed on our first time and they were not the tears of love.
: " Are you a bloody missionary " he belched as he pulled on his boots and dressed to the left. " what happened to the art, the rhythmn? "
I stared at him through ignorance and confusion.
" I thought that in these days of female emancipation you lot were allowed to move and groan when a geezer is giving you one? " He stressed his words as though he were speaking in italics.
" I did not know " I replied
" Well what do you know? "
I thought for a moment and I said, " I know how to bake a raison scone.
" Don't you know anything about IT? "
" Only what they taught us at school and what I learnt from the TV "
" They taught Porn in comprehensives? "
" No, the ones shown on the B.B.C, well more documentary really. "
"Well go and find out, " he snapped
" How can I go and find out what I need to know if I don't know what I need to know to find out? " I cried.
Jason looked at me as though I was a freak then altered his expression as though he remembered that all girls were the same. Then he said: " I don't think we are compatible Deborah." and he left.
I died that day and lay dead for a few weeks.
Then one day I awoke to the surprise that death had not actually bought about my total alienation from society. Although it had made me feel bad, inevitably, no one feels one hundred percent when they have been dead, I began reading.
I began reading to learn something.
I wondered what exactly I had learnt before? I had learnt the history of the world (Censored) I also knew that Einstein was a famous scientist for some reason. Oh and how well that Spinning Jenny worked! We did do a lesson on Marie Curie but I was at the dentist having my tooth pulled and missed it. We were allowed to read Jane Austin and were asked to discuss the place of middle class females in nineteenth century Britain. Dickens we were told was a much better writer, as was Sassoon the poet but not so much Woolfe. Nothing about Boys and Nothing about sex and the swinging elephants!
I read and read and read.
I wrapped myself tight in my mothers blanket made from the: colour purple, which was knitted by Lessing, Miles and Morgan just for the hem, and cross stitched by Angelou, Irigary, Beauvoir and others and more and more others mothers and later I took my Barbie and ken dolls from out of the cupboard and kicked their heads in.
It was at a party on the eve of New Year 1987, that I came face to face with the accepted repentance of my long suffered purgatory, the potential loss of my virginity. I saw him and went in auto drive. Palpitations shimmed down my breasts and burst open in my pants. Every erogenous zone popped simultaneously and in multiple. I felt like toxic malt in a liquor factory as I bubbled and sizzled in his presence. I adored him through lemon tinted specs as he swaggered over to the buffet table, I felt bitter sweet submission to his taut tanned hands as he leant over for the potato salad. Mania dictated that I strip completely naked and throw myself on sausage spick and howl: “Eat me. I’m here!" That thought was soon walloped down when an and equally manic thought arrived and a crazier voice had taken over its loudspeaker chanting in my head:
“The room is full of other women!” It bellowed: “they are over there and over there and over there! Other women that are better dressed more eloquent and damn more sexy than you are!” then just add a feverish point to it’s bellowing it squealed: “Women who are NOT virgins.”
I was a pirate, adrift within the swollen sea. My ship was bashed across the rocks and was plummeting in the icy ocean. Lost, fearful in the unforgiving water, stranded and alone, I was ready to fight, ready to defend and primed for the attack. I would have shouted out for help but for being completely strangled by esoteric rope around my throat which was choking me on my own woven bile.
In a panic and screening for potential competition I scanned the room. There were only three others that may have been some meager competition. I noticed with some relief that skinny jeans was not one of them. Skinny jeans was incapable of fighting for Tin Tin tonight, she was getting drunk with an ugly boy, she was laughing too loudly and giving head to a cheap bottle of cider:
: " You all sorted then? " I winked.
She smiled at me and I smiled back and gave her one last salute:
" It is the charlie perfume " I mouthed and gave confirmatory thumbs up.
It was on that night that I understood that girls are better liers than boys when it comes down to the fact that one has not yet lost their virginity. I was a virgin; even if I gave the impression that I was not. It is now my belief, with hindsight and the wisdom of my years that most of my friends were also virgins. You could never have known that at the time though as girls would not own up to it incase the boy thought she was too frigid to date and the boy never owned up to it because he believed he was losing his virginity:
“any day now mate” anyway.
I had to get his attention. I scattered through the files in my mind, scrutinizing every one at light speed. Every film, book and radio show I had ever read, seen or heard in my entire life was retrieved and dusted. Within thirty seconds I had the file I needed. It was a film, a musical extravaganza the definitive work on all that was romance and the art of love: Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. That had to work! I had no time to lose. HE was ever nearing and the closeness of his gasp was ever sweet. The scent of his skin filled the air and I drank with great gulps the pheromones from the crystal goblet that surrounded him. At fever pitch I snapped open the top two buttons of my A-line blouse and as his hand reached once more towards the potato salad so my own reached for a cocktail sausage. His plastic spoon bent and scooped the creamy clotted substance on to his plate and as it did so I pounced on him. Pushing my chest into his face, I bit into the sausage and in an attempt at an American, Hollywood American, accent, drawled:
" Can I interest yaw in anythin' pardner? " he looked me up and down, beamed broadly and that was that.
He offered me a drink from his can of Caffreys and munching on cheesy Ritz, we made ourselves comfortable on the top stairs. I told him my name, and about my part time job in Kentucky fried chicken:
“Sounds shit " he belched and went on to talk about himself. He was twenty, he worked in a nightclub and his name was Jason.
His name was Jason and I was sat on the staircase to paradise, my dreams had busted out from my slumbered state and had hot rodded, away into the sphere named reality. My virgin frustrations had boiled and sizzled and like bees wax melted and molded my carnal desires into a purer form which was flesh and flesh can be felt and oh how I felt him. I felt him both inside and out. I had given him form and he was mine. As he spoke his words were a dove, swooping and gliding and resting upon my heart. As he laughed his face was a Picasso, colour, form, life and distortion that made perfect sense when taken for just what it was, uninhibited and free. I wanted be one with him and fly with him and laugh and hug him so tight that I could've screamed:
I am in love, I AM IN LOVE! And then he spoke:
" What school did you go to? " he asked.
" A comprehensive " I replied.
" Comprehensive girl are you? Not me. I 'm a grammar boy. I dropped out of Uni. I don’t fancy being the intelligentsia for the establishment all my life. I'm working class now with brains. You have got to have brains to get by. I ask you, who was the most stupid person in the world? I'll tell you! Kennedy. Kennedy had power and looks and money but he couldn’t have had very many brains. If he had had brains then he would have hired himself a stand in and been able to save his head, instead of wall papering that birds face with his brains, see? he would still have been alive right now. Jesus aswell, now he was one hell of a stupid guy. God even warned him of what was going to happen to him and he still walked right into it. Judas though, he had some brains. He made a right nice tidy earner aswell. If you never miss a trick then you got brains. Tricks means saving your ass and a rich man that is dead is only a dead once rich man "
I nodded barely understanding but mesmerized by his tongue moving up and down his lips.
" Well the government knows it’s all about earners. If I wasn’t an anarchist I might have joined the government. I see it this way, they try to segregate us grammars and you comps because they don’t want us brains and your beauty mixing. It will germ up the genes see. It don’t matter now anyway because no ones got a job now; it’s only the top guys that really get the jobs. It is disgusting leaving a human man on the dole like that, stripping him of his manly worth. Now women they are all right, at least they got the babies to keep them occupied. I work in a nightclub.”
" Oh sure, I mean you must get to learn a lot about life in a nightclub.” I stammered and gulped
My face blushed and my blood pressure gushed as my spirit pulled it's self away from my body. G force stretched my lust like an elastic band as it pinged with the shame of my ignorance. Jason was going to talk about sex! Ok he never said sex but I had never been in a nightclub and to me working in a nightclub must be raw pumping sex! Shamed, I tried to retrieve the files I had on sex. Nothing, just a meager folder marked health care and an image of a Barbie and Ken doll.
I wanted to talk to Jason about sex; I wanted to talk about sex on that staircase. I ached to free myself of the chastity of my ignorance intact but at the same time it was comfortable to feel so tight and so bound. That bound up comfort that resembled a baby wrapped tight in a blanket in its mother’s arms. Then instantly, I was aware that I would have the blankets torn from me and that made me feel uncomfortable, very uncomfortable. The cheesy biscuits baked hard and dry on to my tongue, choking me as they built a mountain that my breath could not scale. My saliva that was once an ocean became a drought and a residue of salt was left encrusted deep into the ravines of my mouth. I was choking, fighting for a life between my innocence and raw sexuality.
Although I had emerged into a world that had already promoted free love and freedom of sexuality, I was still inhibited. I had been emancipated from the shackles of the gag acts and signed petitions against using makeup on animals but I had not yet freed my virginity. I had the pill stuffed firmly into my pants draw and I would gaze at it daily dreaming of the day I might consume it but I had not yet tasted it. The pill, that sweet tab. You just drop it with lemon and feel the fear but do it anyway. The pill, the key from the jail of abortions that soap box of doctrines that declares libertarian shafting. Tongues in mouths and not on heads as sperm swims freely to its death and not mine. I needed to taste that pill. I wanted to inject myself with that chemical love until I bloated with poison and become, through intravenous effort, that type of girl.
I was not that type of girl. I was a nice girl, the stable marrying kind of girl that enjoyed nothing more than pin curling my hair like aunty and out witting the neighbors wife by buying the first double glazing. I was the kind of girl that men wanted to protect and buy blenders for on her birthday. I am the type of girl celebrated by future generations for my virginal piety. (Hypocrisy I can stand but piety I detest) I wanted to be a nice girl, who, although flirted with men in courtship was never left in a bath with knitting needles and gin. Sex was for marriage and the alternative bought blood clots, VD and death.
I didn't want to be nice girl, I wanted to be more than her. I wanted to be earth girl and have swinging breasts. I wanted to walk the streets with my breasts flopping out all over the place. Men would die sighing: " sexy chest. " and then faint from the sheer sight of me swinging like a metronome, hustling and bustling my form down the street. My bust swinging heavy, flapping on my bulbous midriff, a bust that belonged to the sexy girl. That was the type of girl that I wanted to be: a sexy girl, a stunning, sexy symbol. I wanted to be a girl that was constantly engaged on a booty call.
I didn't want to die wasting away through virginity. I could picture the doctors saying over my dead body
" Vagina? "
" Shriveled "
" Good. "
"Such a sexy girl, what a shame she died shriveled"
.
" Yeah and she had a great set of knockers."
" Yes doctor, a great set of knockers now on their way to heaven. "
" Yes heaven has a place for girls like her. "
I didn't want to be ashamed of my own sexuality, tucking it away daily in a cross over bra, both of which, might I add cause severe bleeding from prickly heat. I wanted to be lusted after like those women in the magazines.
I wanted to be dirty.
Cleanliness or dirt, what's the difference? One washes in the morning the other morning and night.
Cleanliness and dirt, both pelting the brains out of each other on that staircase to damnation.
And there I was with Gabrielle on the stairway to Hell.
" Y' see men take no shit.” he said: “ They're masters of their own destiny, they can be mean and keen shagging machines if they like. Then in between slurps he added:
“Are you on the pill? "
I nodded. I wasn't technically on the pill. I had it in my pants draw sure, but what was it doing there? And what is its real function? Was it my emancipation from the burdens of my mother’s age or was it Jason's emancipation from the burdens of his fathers?
I decided to cough and ignore his question.
He ignored my cough.
He said: " Of course, in my job you get to see a lot of women and you realize that men and women are fundamentally different. Women are an extension of mens' ribs. Men are always ready for it. Women shouldn’t be slappers though but ready anyway like those women in the magazines but preferably with Monroe's tits. Monroe tits and....? " He thought for a while before adding " Stockings, they wear stockings in a nightclub. Stockings are essential and red lipstick, or just nothing at all with just stockings on if they like. " Then he laughed, raised his can and swirled it, he looked inside it took another swig and said:
" In these days of female emancipation a woman can choose for herself which. Infact, stockings are enough really. In stockings a woman is a woman one hundred per cent. " Then as an after thought of his plateau phase he added, "I bet you will look great in stockings"
I learnt a lot on that New Years Eve, the New Years Eve and understood none of it. It didn't seem to matter though because as the next weeks flew by I gradually learnt that to wear stockings was all that mattered in being a woman. I thought that all the most desired women in the world must have worn stockings. It was their secret, one, which they had guarded through history. The angel Gabrielle had told me so himself and in doing so revealed the secret of my existence. Stockings separated women from the rest of the female sex. I guessed that Bodecia, Joan of Arc, Pandora and even Mary, Mother of Christ herself must have smoothed on those silky stockings and protected themselves from frigidity and rejection and secured a place in the world of immortality. All had flaunted their mystique and yet secured the secret in their plastic chastity belts and carried on pretending to be just like me, just like other mortal virgin females
I did not respond that I had no stockings, I just smiled instead.
I saw a lot of Jason in the two months following that New Years Eve. We would stroll through the park or sit in the graveyard discussing life and death and any other matter that was a threat to teenagers thrill seeking nature. Jason became my first real boyfriend and he breathed life into to my constricted lungs. I wanted being wanted to last. I wanted the days to be never ending; the thought of the darkness after the light scared me. It was the fear I had felt as a child, when, as I heard my mother climb the stairs, I knew the day was over, and that security of her arms were gone and may never return. I would count sheep clutching my Barbie doll in the blackness and pray to sleep until I woke and daylight returned.
I felt in my heart that if Jason ever climbed the stairs I would never wake again.
On Valentines Day of that year, Jasons' love for me was declared in the form of a chain. I was disappointed that it was not a ring but Jason declared:
" We are too much in love to get married and engaged and all that prehistoric sixties and seventies crap. This is the eighties, a new generation and a new era and what is marriage anyway if not the shackling of the working class so the bourgeoisie can screw them both at the same time and for half the price? "
And if that was a declaration of love, I accepted it with honour.
During the days we kissed a lot and went to the Bull Ring. The Bull Ring was a place for teenagers that had nowhere else to go and not much else to do but sit on benches encrusted with bird turd and bread crumbs. We met friends and Jason allowed some Japanese tourists to photograph his hair, which he had backcombed into a Gurkha knife style and had sprayed, red. The style was to denote anger and the colour to depict his masculine contempt for all that was rainbow and hippie. The result was a razor sharp red stab in the face. With hair that style one couldn't fail to be noticed and yet it was a statement that only the Japanese seemed to take notice of. I believe now, that they only took photos so that they could gloat when they arrived back home in Japan: " Look at the British, they think they won the war! Ha! Ha! What for? So that they can walk around Britain with a triangular penis on their heads, smoke, drink, sniff glue and vomit on command.”.
I sat with girls that wore ripped stockings and people that could vomit on command and girls that swore a lot and said things like " Stuff em all, stuff ‘em, we ain’t got no future anyway so why not live life. "
Live Life?? We were killing ourselves.
A lot died or committed suicide of the friends I knew then. It’s not surprising, we were handed down mixed messages, and the media was screaming that anything was possible. We had gender swopping, sex changes, and university for the working class. Yuppies had lots of money but we had no money. We had the free market but no market. We could excel but had nothing to excel towards except one place, the bottom of that sweet smelling glue bottle. Music was urban, primal enticing us to riot but there was nothing to riot towards. Even apathy was knackered:
" God save the Queen, A fascist regime “ It was Prols feeding other prols, prol feed. A bunch of facetious kids joining the free market bandwagon and selling out quick before the tax man arrived and then boasting about it later on tv or beside their hotel pool whilst all around desperate teenagers were dying believing their shit. I watched an interview recently with the lead singer of one of those punk bands, probably about fifty eight now and doing nicely by all accounts. The singer started swearing and the interviewer rather than shocked said:
" We all fucking swear these days. " Is that what it was about? A generation of screwed up depressive's just so we can all swear on TV these days?
I wore stockings, ripped ones and chains, more chains than I care to admit, more of the bondage that made me uncomfortable. I sat in stockings listening to Jason and his mates chatter but now I know at the time it was just men crying for men and screwing women at the same time. There was no equal pain, just one-sided gain. Yet Jason was like a dictator that governed my thoughts, beliefs and actions. I would have died for him and death had to be the outcome unless my love was fulfilled with his love.
That valentines day Jason and I had sex for the first time. We went to a pub, got drunk and ate curry sauce and chips on the bus home. When we reached his house no one was in so we went to bed. His arms and the bed were both comfortable and warm. I was wanted, I had been taken, and I was sexy lady with a red-hot inner sanctum. I was a begotten mistress of an erotic host, I was ripe with lust and I was loved. I could never forget that night, the night I first had sex. It was not the act that stands clear in my mind but the feeling. That night I felt that I was grafted onto Jason forever. As we walked the star bright, empty streets, hand in hand, I was disappointed that the world still moved on, that the stars shone and the road still ran and that there were lights in the windows and foxes prowled. The world should have stopped and time ceased forever. But that night something was altered forever because I had changed. I had let a man inside and was no longer one person but two people, Jason and I in just one skin. I groaned with the misery of ever having to say goodbye, he groaned just.... because.
In hindsight I can see that our groans meant different things. I had arrived and he was just leaving. He had only held me in his arms. I had held him in my heart and the two are fundamentally different.
I went to bed dreaming of tomorrow but it never came, I died the morning after. Didn't someone once say that sex brings the little death? I always thought that death was a snubbing out of life but my death was a blast in the heart because Jason did not phone. I tried phoning him for several days without a reply and then gave up and wrote him a letter.
Dear Jason.
I will not regret my taken virginity and will not deny the woman in me. I have given all for your love. All for your cause. I wear stockings.
Your Lover Debs
******
Jason visited me the day after the letter arrived. He said he had given up the streets and had taken up a condensed course studying philosophy and art.
.
" There is all this stuff on form and life and colour. " he said.
" But I love you " I cried " And you never phoned. "
Jason released the laces on his boots and sat down:
" Debs just because we had a shag doesn't mean that we are tied together” and then he added with a sigh and a drag of a cigarette:
" What is love? I mean, whom the Hell knows anyway? Is sex love or is love just designed to make us feel "... he stroked four fingers in the air " as if we have ‘purpose’ in this seemingly meaning less existence?”
Then he started humming all you need is love: "Bollocks, he hummed again “ all you need is two million in the bank and every one will love you. Love as a feeling is dead because it was a cancer and we nuked it. Love is insignificant now, don't you think? "
No! I did not think. I did not bloody well think. If love was insignificant then I was insignificant. I stared at him and for a moment I experienced pure hate. Years later someone said to me that hate was not the opposite of love, but indifference was.
Jason complained: “ You have absolutely no knowledge Debs, you are a simple girl that believes in all that bullshit and you have no rhythm." and he retrieved a tatty copy of N.M.E from his jacket pocket.
"Haven't I? " I said,
" You need to get knowledge and rhythm it will make you sexier when I do you" he smiled " You cant just lie there mute and wiggling your hips as though you have ring worm. You have to move, be sensual, be free and filled with the knowledge of what we are actually fucking doing. Be like musical art a singing picture” Then he stopped, started again and added: “ Did you know that in ancient India a royal couple would have sex on the back of an elephant? "
" Oh sure " I replied as though I knew something, anything that might win his favour.
" Really? " he sneered with a nod towards my vest. I began to take it of:
" then you will also know that it was the slow, heavy gait of the elephant as it trundled along that added to the sensational feeling of sensuality to the pair screwing on its back. "
I fumbled for my own poetic style as I said : " Yes, it was the, erm, swayality of the fat elephantine that did the trick I expect. " and I failed miserably.
Jason threw his leather jacket around my goose like loins and sniffed from a bottle of poppers and began to chant, " sex is rhythm, rhythm is sex, sex is art.”
He was chanting and dancing and gyrating and rubbing his clothed body against my naked own. Then he lay me down, and lying beside me he unzipped his trousers and started jabbing himself harder into my side. Harder and harder as he pushed the bottle up to my nose making me choke on the putrid scent. Gasping and feeling sick, I lay with my body twisted as the room began to spin, for a second there were splashes of form and colour and screaming life, then it all fell silent .
Later on my own I cried. Those second lot of tears were not the same tears that I shed on our first time and they were not the tears of love.
: " Are you a bloody missionary " he belched as he pulled on his boots and dressed to the left. " what happened to the art, the rhythmn? "
I stared at him through ignorance and confusion.
" I thought that in these days of female emancipation you lot were allowed to move and groan when a geezer is giving you one? " He stressed his words as though he were speaking in italics.
" I did not know " I replied
" Well what do you know? "
I thought for a moment and I said, " I know how to bake a raison scone.
" Don't you know anything about IT? "
" Only what they taught us at school and what I learnt from the TV "
" They taught Porn in comprehensives? "
" No, the ones shown on the B.B.C, well more documentary really. "
"Well go and find out, " he snapped
" How can I go and find out what I need to know if I don't know what I need to know to find out? " I cried.
Jason looked at me as though I was a freak then altered his expression as though he remembered that all girls were the same. Then he said: " I don't think we are compatible Deborah." and he left.
I died that day and lay dead for a few weeks.
Then one day I awoke to the surprise that death had not actually bought about my total alienation from society. Although it had made me feel bad, inevitably, no one feels one hundred percent when they have been dead, I began reading.
I began reading to learn something.
I wondered what exactly I had learnt before? I had learnt the history of the world (Censored) I also knew that Einstein was a famous scientist for some reason. Oh and how well that Spinning Jenny worked! We did do a lesson on Marie Curie but I was at the dentist having my tooth pulled and missed it. We were allowed to read Jane Austin and were asked to discuss the place of middle class females in nineteenth century Britain. Dickens we were told was a much better writer, as was Sassoon the poet but not so much Woolfe. Nothing about Boys and Nothing about sex and the swinging elephants!
I read and read and read.
I wrapped myself tight in my mothers blanket made from the: colour purple, which was knitted by Lessing, Miles and Morgan just for the hem, and cross stitched by Angelou, Irigary, Beauvoir and others and more and more others mothers and later I took my Barbie and ken dolls from out of the cupboard and kicked their heads in.
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