Strip City: A Stripper's Farewell Journey Across America (3 page)

This transient spirit is exalted in early August when the bikes start coming through en route to Sturgis, South Dakota, for Bike Week. At every stoplight on the shortcut to U.S. 85, prides of Harleys idle at low growl, saddle bags loaded and bedrolls strapped to the sissy bars. Gas stations teem with bikes filling up at every pump. To experience the full glory of this pilgrimage, you have to break free of town on 85 where the speed limit notches up to seventy-five miles an hour. There you see thousands of bikes riding staggered at top speed, past the grassy beige blur of nameless land and the small towns that hug the highway Meridian, Hawk Springs, Lingle, Jay Em, and Lusk. Somewhere up near Newcastle, the sun-baked grasslands give way to the spruce-dotted red clay slopes of the Black Hills. You know you've arrived when the temperature drops ten degrees, a welcome gift courtesy of the abundant pines wicking heat from the air. The two-lane highway, for hundreds of miles a near straightaway, curves gracefully through the cool glades, past Lead and Deadwood, where it meets Highway 14 and goes on into Sturgis proper.

I was never much for bikes. As a ghoulie punk kid, the entire package—engine grease, calling women "old ladies," Lynyrd Skynyrd—seemed crusty and beat, and the racist cracker element set my teeth on edge. Then the Yuppies horned in and the biker lifestyle-as-commodity wrinkle made the whole thing seem even sillier: Harley-Davidson coffee, Harley-Davidson baby clothes, even Harley-Davidson chocolate-covered peanut clusters. Born to Be Wild, Inc. Who needed it? But I was a self-satisfied snot who had always lived in tightly packed urban grids where I could frown stylishly at the whole scene without ever experiencing what's at the heart of it. When I got out into the Wyoming sticks and could tear around a bit on an open road, I understood. Peel away the totems, the predictable rebel conformity clause, and the purchasing push, and you strike the vein of a bike's appeal: It's as close to flight as a human being can get without having to leave the ground.

But we're not on a bike today—Randy and I are in his truck, speeding toward Sturgis, watching in awe and not just a little envy as the phalanxes of Harleys roar by. We're listening to the radio and eating boxed fried chicken. We pass a small plastic container of potato salad back and forth, and I search the stations for good music while Randy drives.

Ozzy Osbourne comes on. I turn it way up.

Resting my feet on the dash, I tap my toes. Randy drums his fingers on the steering wheel.

We've been a couple now for eight months and heavy metal had a cupid effect on us. When Randy confided that he really doesn't like country that much and would pick AC/DC over George Jones any day, I was relieved. It gave us a common territory, a shared language. Our love of really loud music gave us something to latch onto during my first visits to Cheyenne when it seemed like we had little more to go on than an abundance of chemistry and wishful thinking.

I crank the window open and hold my hand out, fingers splayed to feel the warm wind rushing through.

"You know," I muse aloud, relishing how the guitar solo complements the ranginess of the surroundings, the speed of the truck, "sometimes you've just gotta rock."

"That is the absolute truth."

…

Randy rented us a cabin at the top of a mountain in Lead. The owners, an elderly couple, meet us at the foot of the mountain and we follow them up the gravel-pocked road past gaily trimmed resort chalets and skeletons of old houses, abandoned once the Black Hills mines were exhausted years ago. Broken down to planks and shingles, their roofs collapsed after years of sighing under winter snow pack, they lean in wait for gravity to claim them.

The cabin, tucked into a densely wooded lot, smells of moths and liniment. We put our bags in the bedroom and I change clothes. Randy heads into the living room, which is outfitted in fake leather couches, plaid nubby slipcovered armchairs, and shellacked wood Christian affirmation plaques. When I come out and join him on the crinkly brown pleather couch, I notice he has poured champagne into the nicest glasses he could find in the kitchen cabinets—matching glass beer mugs. The air in the room is stagnant and hot.

Before I know what is happening, Randy drops down on one knee in the burnt-orange deep-pile shag carpet, takes a ring box out from under his cowboy hat, and asks me to marry him.

I want to daintily hold out my left hand and murmur a quivering, misty-eyed yes, but I don't. My hands fly to my face and I start laughing and crying at the same time. Because it is so unexpected. Because it is so sweet. Because it is so awful and perfect, with the leather-look upholstery and the old-people medicine-scented air and the slightly muggy embrace of the South Dakota night.

He slips the ring on my finger, and we kiss. Then we trek down the hill and into Deadwood, where we walk along Main Street, sharing the good news whenever we run into someone we know. In every bar, club, and casino, people toast our happy occasion over the ubiquitous refrain of "Sweet Home Alabama."

…

I wake the next day feeling like something is sitting on my chest, crashing me. Holding back the flimsy curtains made of cotton flowered sheets trimmed in red rickrack, I look out at the morning sun blazing through a stand of birch trees, the silvery bark bouncing the light into the canopy of leaves, making the forest a heaven of golden greens. Randy is still asleep, innocent masculine sweat sprinkling his brow. This ache in my chest is killing me. I'm such an asshole.

Randy lifts his head up from the pillow when he hears me sigh. "Is something wrong?"

"Oh, God. I can't marry you."

"What? What?! Why?" He sits up, his hair matted and going in a million directions.

"I'm not ready! I've only known you for a couple of months. Where will we live? I don't know if I want to live in Wyoming, and you don't know if you'll be happy in New York, and this is so sudden. I want to, but, it… it's just too soon!"

Randy lies back down and rolls over on his side, facing me.

"Well, if that's all it is, we can wait."

I take a deep breath.

"Just give me some time."

When we get back to Cheyenne and I call my mother in New Jersey to tell her, she is nonplussed. She's made it clear that seeing her children marry has never been a huge priority. Once in a while she reminds my siblings and me that she'd be perfectly content if, after finding the right partner, we bypass the formality of making it legal. Neither of my parents ever put any pressure on me in that regard, though occasionally, my mother will read about or see someone on TV who she thinks might be a good match.

"That Ted Nugent was on David Letterman the other night. He's very articulate, you know."

Ted Nugent. Oh good God, no.

"Mother, I am not interested in dating Ted Nugent."

"He doesn't look it, but he's really very intelligent!"

"Mom, I'm serious. I made a vow to never date anyone politically to the right of Barry Goldwater. Besides, he hunts."

"He's very handsome, though."

"Mom, he's married."

I can't blame my mom for agitating on my behalf, since I am certain she views my dating criteria as highly suspect. The only person I ever dated with whom she had any prolonged contact was my druggie high school boyfriend, Peter Doylan. Peter played guitar in a rather awful punk band and had a dyed-black mohawk. He also had a pretty big nose, so in photographs taken from head-on, with the mohawk showing up as just a centrally placed black tuft and the nose being what it was, he looked a lot like Bert from "Sesame Street." His greatest mortification was having the middle name Francis, so when anyone asked about the F, he said his name was "Peter Fuckin' Doylan." During the year that we were together, Peter was in and out of crash pads and in and out of work, so my mom must've been thinking that any musician with an actual job would be an improvement. She was probably right.

But Ted Nugent? I mean, really.

"Wy-O-ming?" my friends in New York exclaim when I tell them that I've decided I'd rather relocate to Cheyenne than attempt the formidable task of carving out life a deux in the city. "Why the hell are you moving all the way out to Wy-O-ming?"

I don't quite know what to say. How to explain to them that ever since I returned from my crosscountry trip, Manhattan seems different? Less exciting and more confining. Plus, I am becoming increasingly annoyed with my New York self. I lived there for a couple years as a punky teen dropout, and the city then seemed scary and magnificent. But now, after having returned as an ambitious twenty-something media-type-in-training, I find myself looking around at everything with an unsatisfied sniff. I'm too easily irritated and bored, and I'm disturbed by the arrogance that that implies. I feel as if I've gotten to the bottom of the New York mystery that has enchanted me since I was a small child. So if it is indeed true that I know everything that is worth knowing, and I have solved the metropolitan puzzle known as New York City, then why stay? I want to be someplace, and be surrounded by things, that I don't immediately recognize and greet with contempt.

Randy told me he proposed in order to show me that our time together wasn't for naught. I decided to move to Wyoming for the same reason. That, and the roaches. Sometime during our torrid crosscountry affair, the roof in my Chelsea apartment building cracked and sprang a leak, fostering an infestation of two-inch-long flying cockroaches. While having a phone conversation with Randy, during which I had to put down the phone three times to chase—shoe in hand—after a giant roach, I decided that Wyoming had to be better than this. I didn't want the halcyon days of new love queered by clouds of Raid.

When I move in with Randy, we don't attain immediate domestic bliss. I have to kick and scream a little. I wish I were an easier person to live with. I can effortlessly go all giddy and foolish over a throwaway affair, because there's no compromise in a dead end. But I'm thornier when there are future prospects, because I get nervous.

I want to fall in love but I don't want my life to be subsumed. My independence is the key to my sanity, and I'm loath to see it jeopardized even though I long to be held and kissed and fussed over and to do the same for someone else, too. I know you can have it all, but how?

I've seen countless smart, inspired women slip under their mates' feet—in terrific haste or by attrition, but always to the same sad end—and I am scared of that happening to me. So I try to strike that critical balance between love's submission and personal autonomy, but my execution is pretty hairy. When I dated an artist, it turned into a constant battle over which one of us was Yoko (not me!). When I was involved with a Marxist fanzine publisher, we always bickered over what I considered to be his oppressive politics. I don't want to be a battle-ax, but I always feel I have to resist being squashed and I'm not sure how to refine my approach. Is this a typical modern woman's dilemma? I don't know, but it's certainly my dilemma.

I'm not nearly so bad with Randy. I'm more confident now about how to keep Stepford Wifery at bay. But there's still this defensive thing that I do. Every so often I have a hiccup of New York-style snobbery about some bullshit matter, like not being able to find the MC5 in the record store, or the fact that salads in the restaurants around town are still at the no tengo arugula stage. One time when we were driving somewhere in the truck I rolled my eyes because he didn't know who Eustace Tilley was. It was the first time I turned that attitude on Randy, and the last.

He came completely uncorked. "Do you know the difference between a two-by-four and a two-by-six?" he yelled.

I sat there dumbfounded. I'd never seen him lose his temper before, at least not with me.

"Well, do you?"

Silence.

"I didn't think so! So don't treat me like I'm stupid, because I know plenty of things that you don't!"

In Wyoming, they call that fixing someone's wagon. Thereafter my wagon was suitably fixed.

Most of the time, though, we have a pretty great time. We travel back East together now and again, and I introduce Randy to museums and restaurants. So far he likes the low-key Mafia hangout in the West Village best. When we're home, I spend the day at the desk in the spare bedroom working on articles, while Randy goes to the job sites to line out his men. Come summer, I ditch work and tag along whenever he goes to a rodeo for a wild horse race. Even though I spent the first rodeo with my hands clapped over my mouth in fright watching the mugger and shank man on his team steady the untamed horse as it burst into the arena so Randy could saddle it and attempt to ride it across the finish line, I find them fun. The only thing I actively dislike is the steer wrestling—men grabbing the animal by the horns and twisting its neck until it falls—boomp!—in the dirt. I appreciate all the rest, though—the God-fearing cowboys with crosses stitched into the flank of their chaps, the mud, the rodeo queens with their satin sashes and sky-high lacquered hair, the bulls milling around in the stock pens and firing from the chutes, snorting and spinning.

Love can't sustain solely on "exotic other" confectionery. For it to last there has to be more—a singular quality that makes it a love that not just intrigues but lets you sleep better at night. In an interview, a well-known CEO described what he'd sought in a mate back when he was single. He said he wanted a woman so resourceful that if he ever found himself in a Third World prison, she'd know exactly how to go about getting him freed. To him, the most prized characteristic is capability. To me, it's bloody-knuckled devotion. The moment that I really believed Randy and I would make it in the long run was when he said to me, "I may not win every fight I'd get in to defend you, but I'd die trying." I realized in an instant that this streetwise chivalry was what I'd been looking for my whole life. Not because I need so much to be protected by a m-a-n but because that's also how I feel. My loyalties may be few, but they are not subtle. He would go to the wall for me, and I for him. No one would dare try to disrespect or harm either of us in the other's presence. Not if he valued his windpipe.