"This is train wreck."
"This is beyond a train wreck"
"This is a train wreck that happens because the conductor was looking out the window at a seven car pile-up"
Its Saturday night, two summers ago. A lone evening off from a low budget film project for which I find myself, somehow or another, in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
In the suspiciously stained back booth of an unsavory bar I exchange catty quips with "L" -Our wardrobe designer, stylist, former pageant queen and all-around terrible person.
We'd been holed up in a seemy little no-tell motel spitting distance from the highway. Boasting fifteen-minute rates, a close proximity to Kohl's and sheets that give you skin diseases medical science hasn't seen in five centuries, it was the sort of place that afforded little rest without considerable intoxication.
At the recommendation of the front desk clerk (and perhaps despite his questionable twitch) we'd hit the local dive.
A pick-up joint.
Shitty. Nondescript. Named something predictably Irish (Saucy McDrunkerson's: Hell yes these people are getting laid!)
We walk a half mile in the dark to find it jam-packed. A singles' night full to the brim with weathered people. Still-uniformed middle-aged waitresses, chain smoking steel workers and way, WAAY too many truckers. I fear by night's end ill have somehow gotten in a fight about Toby Kieth.
Its a hell of a scene:
Large, leathery breasts. Too-tight pants.
The stench of desperation, which, from the air around me, I reckon smells a lot like Newports and Lean Cuisine.
There are lines everywhere.
People are filling out forms.
SPEED DATING is going on...
...Well FUCK. This just got kind of entertaining.
I input this new data and scrutinize the crowd.
Speed Dating.
Here.
Why the hell not.
I wonder aloud what that must be like:
"Reds or Menthols?" I snicker "Pabst or Shlitz?" "How many years have you owned your Jean Jacket?" "How long was your tour in 'Nam?"
(If you don't stop me folks, they'll keep on coming)
I've managed to fully entertain myself when L interjects with needless acid:
"Look at these pieces of shit" she says, with palpable venom. "Same fucking people that try to tell you G-d doesn't make mistakes. Shit. I gotta get a picture"
she rifles for her phone, through a Bottega Veneta bag that probably cost more than the combined wardrobe of everyone around us.
... that I have a sudden, intense urge to take a dump in.
When she hoists her phone to snap a picture, heartbreakingly, folks in the crowd actually smile. A town devoid of irony. They whisper and glance repeatedly in our direction. It occurs to me that sitting there, with our outfits and purses and still human looking flesh, we stand out.
L is wearing sunglasses at 10pm. She's redheaded, twee and overaccessorized. I am wearing shelltoes,pigtails and a purple dress more accurately described as 'tank top'.
People stare, of course.
People ALWAYS stare at ridiculous other people...
L sneers:
"They think we're somebody."
I look down at my bare lap.
Somebody who needs pants.
Something troubling stirs in her eyes. Every gaze in her direction seems to fuel it. She's a beautiful girl, used to being looked at, but the attention around her now makes her...swell. I swear, for a moment, she looks healthier, blood in her cheeks, light in her eyes. A vampire whose life force comes from the envy of less attractive women.
"Way to rock your Wal-Mart spring '05 ladies. God. Its like a bunch of turds decided it was their day to be fancy. FUCK why don't I have service!"
I'm not sure who it is she thinks needs to see pictures of middle-aged singles on a Saturday night. I picture her clicking on an email tab that says "Other Douchebags"
Unable to send her pictures, she heads up to get us drinks. A sizeable woman brushes past her on her way to potential new love.
"What is this? JC Penny? Its nice" she says, pinching the fabric of the strange woman's brown plus-size top. The woman thanks her earnestly, to which she responds with an enormous roll of her huge brown eyes. Men whistle at no one in particular, she exaggerates her visible disgust.
Granted, nobody wants the affections of truckers, but there's an extra measure of arrogance here, as if everything in her is screaming "DO YOU KNOW WHO I FUCKING AM?"
I laugh to myself.
A hundred miles away, honey, you are nobody.
---
Despite being someone who devotes an inordinate amount of time to beautiful, I'm well aware that in New York, beautiful is nothing.
Shit, in the grand scheme of life its nothing, but in New York beautiful is every fifth person.
Its serving you dinner at Olives. Its naked in the next dressing room. Its booking your bikini wax, asking aloud about your upper lip and arriving daily on the first bus from Akron. Beautiful is so ubiquitous here, its damn near boring.
As a result, the beautiful people in New York are often, the most cripplingly insecure.
L, like me, was crushed in the vice of film and fashion. Its a business that thrives on making people discover new things to hate about themselves. The back of my head is a leetle too flat to pull off a fedora. That I KNOW that says a lot about the day to day vileness you have to endure.
I'm fortunate in that, even at my most superficial, with fake hair a tanning package and not an ounce of solid food in my belly, I managed to retain enough of my good sense to realize its all bullshit, and more importantly, its all VERY temporary.
Maybe I just had better friends.
L's cattiness was honed in gay clubs and go-sees. She'd sit snickering with small time designers as they dismissed models for the pointyness of their ears and angle of their teeth. Her self-loathing was the product of a youth spent in vicious competition for the title of Miss Prefabricated Suburb. She was a petri dish of infectious bile. We became friends on another set because she told me she liked to "Roll with vanity vag"
-It speaks ill of me to even have continued that conversation...
I understood her .
I knew how easy it was to feel deflated by the size or hair or clothes of every other girl around you. In Allentown, she had absolutes. She was thinner, younger, prettier than absolutley everyone else in the bar. She would never have to look for love in the world wearied eyes of a former longshoreman. She was something she never really got to be at home.
She was unquestionably, inarguably- better.
----
I'm not above being a bitch. I catch myself, often, being mind blowingly judgmental. If you suck as a human being, BELEIVE that I'm thinking it every time I see you. If you suck as a human being *and* you happen to have honkin' man boobs, thats likely how I describe you to everyone I know.
I'm not innocent, but I'm also not reasonlessly shitty.
So PA Singles Night was a shitshow, sure. Yeah there's something inherently hilarious about a miniskirt worn by what can be described as a woman only in the loosest sense of the word, but at the end of the day, we are all part of the same puke-colored paisley print of people. Being beautiful is not the thing that untangles your thread.
You can stand out. You can be extraordinary. You can be the color nobody else can describe, but simply being HUMAN, you can never really stand apart.
And at my worst, my bitchiest, knowing that is what saved me from being like L.
Am I insecure? Certainly. You probably are too. Every one of us wrestles with some form of distorted self opinion. When it drives you, you find yourself constantly hitting walls.
Someone will always be, always have- something more than you, something you deserve, something thats always been hopelessly out of your reach. Its easy to find comfort by shitting all over the people who have less.
Of course, it also makes you a total asshole.
So yeah,
I spend alot of time on Beautiful.
I think about it all day long.
Its my cat sleeping with his belly arched to the sky. Its My boyfriend consumed in learning.
The light that hits fourth avenue at 3 o'clock, The bracelet I found for two dollars in the Atlantic Avenue salvo and the remarkable way my friend Laurel moves her hands.
It exists in everything, I'm sure somewhere deep even in the things I hate. In the worn flesh of Allentown truckers, and the ladies they ineptly woo. Who were put on this earth for a purpose beyond making L (or anyone else) feel better about the size of her ass
-but yes, it does exist in her too.
All that said,
Hi Everybody!
It's good to be back- and if I ever forget to tell you.
You are all
Really
Really
Beautiful.
Love you like plastic fingernails and a half-smoked pack of Kools,
Regan
