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Two
years ago, red-haired Courtney Marie moved from Tonopah to Las Vegas,
and now, she sits across the table at a local dive, drinking vodka-and-cranberry
cocktails, and talks about her childhood, pill-popping, art, and sex.
She eventually decides on a visit to the local Adult Superstore on Tropicana
Avenue – needless to say, by the end the end of the interview, I
was really let down when she didn’t buy a dildo.
The Dispensary-- It’s the sort of local Las Vegas dive
decorated with plastic ivy and white trellis, where, at 1 pm men in soft
ball caps sit at the bar and play video poker, smoke cigarettes and order
scotch-and-sodas from the bartender: a woman, fifty something, who looks
comfortable in her sequin-splattered black leotard, shiny nude tights,
and pancake; or the waitress, who has the same ageless smoky look as the
bartender, the same shiny nude tights, but wears a red leotard with military-motifs
on the shoulders. Our young artist, Marie, wears a black tank top, a black
cardigan, a knee-length fuchsia-and-teal skirt, and black Mary Janes.
She carries a plastic black-and-white checkered bag decorated with cherries.
“I’m an art major,” she says. “Sculpture –
and some of my favorite sculptors are Ava Hess and Robert Smithson.”
She explains that she has always been interested in art, but sculpture
really turns her on in a way that no drawing ever could. She also likes
David Sedaris and the White Stripes, vintage t-shirts and NASCAR, but
though her likes and looks scream Chicago indie, her memories are mostly
of Tonopah.
Ah, Tonopah! That desert village, barely alive, where the people are so
hardy that they drink beer and sand. In Tonopah, Marie was born February
16, 1982, to a kindergarten teacher and a motorcycle racer turned
sewer man.
“I lived in Tonopah most of my life,” she says. “Excluding
periods when my parents sent me away to live with relatives, when I had
a chance, in my early teens, to live on an Indian Reservation and in a
suburb of Chicago” (which explains the outfit). “I came to
Las Vegas in the summer of 2000, to attend the university, this being
my only chance to leave Tonopah. I spent my first two years living in
dormitories and friends’ apartments. I spend my of my free time
here reliving a youth I haven’t really had.”
Her red hair is pushed behind her ears, and she peers at me through black
cat-eye glasses. She wears no makeup. She has a red nose. She snorts.
She is happy to be here. “It’s got the classic rock on the
radio…it makes me feel like the white trash I am,” she says
over the smoky voices of Don Henley and Glenn Frye, warning us that One
of these nights/In between the dark and the light/Coming right behind
you/Swear I’m gonna find you/Get ‘ya baby one of these nights.
After listening to the song, she says, “I love walking alone at
night, because I always have to do it – but I’m a target,
a walking target.” She references the harassment she received when
she lived on the trailer park on the Colorado River Indian Tribe Reservation
– with her grandparents, who weren’t Native American, but
rather, Irish and Scottish – and who, because they lived in the
trailer park rather than on the reservation, were considered “classier.”
“You know a place is shitty when the trailer park is high class,”
says Marie. “I worked at an A&W, and every night I had to walk
home through these sketchy dirty roads. The nights were pitch black and
alcoholic.” She wrinkles her nose. “It wasn’t much fun.”
There is a certain sense of danger every woman confronts when she walks
alone at night, pointed out to us since childhood, but that we have to
learn as we become adults. There are no textbooks for understanding how
to subtlety project that you’re tough, that you know where you’re
going, that you’re comfortable with the most dark and nefarious
corners, or that you know how to respond to approaching strangers in the
“right” way. No, you have to rely on instinct to teach you
how to not project fear. Marie says she has been in many precarious situations
with strange men while she takes walks at night, in Las Vegas, usually
from the bar to her car – strange men hiss, whisper, ask if “her
carpet matches the curtains.” Unbelievably enough, these exchanges
almost always begin with “hello.”
She says “I always say ‘hi’ back. I don’t know
what else to do.” Her most recent indecent approach was about a
month ago.
“I was walking to my car from the Icehouse,” she says, “And
this man said Hi, and I said Hi back, and he asked for a kiss. I said
I’d rather not, but then he grabbed my arm. I thought wow, this
is it, it’s finally going to happen, but then we heard voices
from around the corner, so he dropped my arm and ran off.” She laughs
nervously. “I don’t know, maybe I shouldn’t say Hi
back all the time. Maybe I should do something different.” She looks
down at her drink, and appears to consider different actions she could
take to avoid such confrontations in the future.
There is no way to avoid what the Oxygen network makes so many
women feel is inevitable – that the world is full of men, biting
at the bit to exert their physical strength over unknown women, like men
en masse can’t wait, can’t wait to grab our strange arms,
manhandle us into a dark corner, and, despite our protests, push our skirts
up. Or at least, the Oxygen network lets us know the threat is
always there. Lingering. Every time a woman wants to be alone.
Instead of responding appropriately to her remark (and is there an appropriate
way to respond?) I decide to ask her about her father. How does one go
from being a motorcycle-racer to a sewer man? And what, exactly, is a
sewer-man?
“Oh, he just worked in the sewers a lot,” Marie says. “Once
he took me down there with him. It was a lot of big, wet tunnels.”
“Did you take pictures?” I say.
“No, no pictures,” she says. “But I have a good story
about my dad, you want to hear it?”
She didn’t need to ask.
“There was the known town drunkard, and my family and I
were living in Tonopah, remember, where the Cottontail Ranch [the brothel]
was, and he was talking and talking and one night I asked him how much
it cost for a drink down at the Cottontail Ranch, just for fun, and he
said, six-fifty. That’s a lot of money for a drink, but
considering the context, makes perfect sense. So, two weeks later, I’m
sitting in the back seat of the car, my mom is driving and my dad is looking
out the passenger window, and we pass the Cottontail Ranch, and I say,
just for fun, Hey dad, how much does a drink cost down there? and he says,
Six-fifty.
“That’s my dad… it was, you know, it was just natural.”
She laughs again. Everything is natural.
“I never smoked a lot of weed,” she said, “But I love
pills, I can pop pills like nobody’s business. I remember this one
time when I was with some friends in high school, in a gas station bathroom,
and there were these enormous pills on the countertop, they were probably
vitamin pills, now that I think about it, but we just took them, without
thinking, without anything. I suppose it was pretty stupid but I just
love pills. I love the expectation. And I love drag queens,” she
says, as if remembering something. “They can teach us a lot about
being women, like you don’t need a vagina to be a woman.”
“I’m going to get another drink,” she says, and orders
another vodka-and-cranberry. “It’s my birthday tomorrow,”
she says, and leans toward me. “And do you know what I gave myself
for my birthday? My first Brazilian bikini wax!”
Marie, with her thick glasses and indie/dowdy attire, does not strike
you as a woman who is likely to wax her pussy.
“I’ll tell you what, it doesn’t hurt at all, at least
not as bad as you think it’s gonna hurt, but there are two moments
of hesitation…one, when the Russian lady is peering at you from
between your legs, your clit between her fingers, instructing you to “get
ready,” and the other, when you’re on your stomach, and you
hear her instruct you to “pull apart” your ass. Otherwise,
the procedure was quite pleasant – it was a process of spreading
you with warm wax, a brief inhale of breath, and then the soothing application
of talcum powder. The results have lasted for about two weeks, but it’s
growing back terribly, like bad razor stubble. I suppose that just means
I’ll have to get another. I have to get a dildo, too. The guy I’m
fucking right now thought it would be a good idea.”
“He’s older, thirty-two, and we’ve been friends for
a while. I guess you could call him my boyfriend, but he’s really
just the guy I’m fucking…. You wanna go to the Adult Superstore
on Tropicana? We can go there. That might be good for your article.”
Suddenly, we’re in her car, where she claims to hate turning left
while driving. “Left turns are so risky,” she says.
When she turns left into the Adult Superstore, we are nearly cut off by
a SUV with spinning rims. The sounds of R&B fill the air. In the parking
lot, men and women wearing t-shirts and jeans carry bulging opaque black
bags to their cars.
We enter the store, and it is much, much larger than I expect. My first
impression is similar to the feeling you get when you enter Wal-Mart –
where do you go and what do you do? But Marie knew what to do. Marie walks
right through the carousel and up to the dildo isle. I follow her, and
am drawn immediately to the glass case that displays dildos made from
Porn Star Pricks.
“Yeah!” she says. “ look at Ron Jeremy’s, he’s
huge….I met him once at a party,” she says. “He was
quite intelligent…”
“Here, you have to see these.” She guides me to a display
of flesh-colored fists.
“Isn’t that crazy? There’s one in the shape of a fish,
and one like this,” she presses her fingertips together and make
her hand into a duckbill. “Isn’t that crazy? I get the biggest
kick out of that.” Then she leads me to the blow-up dolls and starts
sifting through the boxes. “I’m looking for this one thing…”
She points to the small, empty holes in the bottom corners of the boxes.
“But people always steal them…ah-ha! Here’s one.”
She holds out a box. Filling the small hole was a tiny mouth made out
of soft latex. The box guides customers to try it and see – which
I do. I put my finger in the little mouth that had been blackened by the
countless other fingers that did was they were told, and the mouth, cold,
soft, and squishy, seemed to latch on to my finger and suck. The feeling
of that little cold mouth frightened me.
Marie laughs. “Isn’t it great? And look over here, look at
all these ben-wa balls. They’re not really what they’re cracked
up to be…these always break, for instance. And these…well
I haven’t tried these yet…” She inspects the package,
then puts it back.
“Look at this,” I say, and point to the Fairy Princess
Gift Pack.
“Fairy Princess!” she squeals. We open the box and see that
to be a fairy princess; a woman needs a sparkly purple butterfly--shaped
vibe, a bottle of glittery lube, a plastic purple tiara, and a purple
cock--ring.
“It’s everything we ever needed,” Marie snorts, and
leads me to the video section. “This is my favorite, especially
the big momma porn.” We look at rows and rows of videotapes, all
displaying naked girls in various states of nudity.
“The titles are really great,” she says. -- everything is
great -- and points some out to me: Tea Bagger Vance, Tig Ol’
Bitties, Moulin Splooge, Sex-Starved Fuck Sluts #22: Stinky White Women,
Abs of Cum (what on earth could this be about?), and
Amber the Lesbian Queefer.
But the novelty of the sex store starts to wear off. We’ve spent
most of the time looking at the products or the floor, afraid that the
eyes of all the men in this place will attempt to swallow us whole. Despite
the liberation we feel at being brave enough to enter such a store so
boldly, we both start to feel a little uneasy. We want to leave. Now.
We’re getting sex store headaches.
Marie takes one last look at the bottles of lube – there are hundreds
of bottles of lube here, pink and blue and clear plastic, with names like
Anal Eaze, Light Elbow Grease, Maximus Lubricant, and ID
Juicy Lube.
“Not that I need it,” she says, a little too loudly, perhaps.
“But I prefer water-based lubricant.”
She continues to look at the bottles until I say, “So, you gonna
buy a dildo?”
”Nah,” she says.
I don’t push it. Maybe she doesn’t have the money, or maybe
she’s shy. Or maybe she’s starting to feel the pressure.
We walk to her car. She is kind enough to offer me a ride home, and she
takes Tropicana through the Strip, east, to my apartment.
“I like your skirt,” I say. It is fuchsia silk, the wrinkles
shine turquoise. It reminds me of the inside of a genie bottle.
“Thanks…hey…I’m not wearing any underwear!”
she says, as we pass under the MGM Lion.
As we pull into my apartment complex, a final question: “Have you
ever hooked?” We had grown comfortable enough with each other by
that time for me to be able to ask the question without sounding like
an asshole. And I was curious. I’m always curious about how other
women react to this second option offered by Oxygen – It’s
out there, like the threat of sexual assault – one of the alternatives
you can choose to be afraid of or accept. And instead of punching me in
the eye, Marie answers my question with the same good-nature with which
it was offered.
“Oh God, no,” she says. “Unless you count all those
blow-jobs I gave in high school for pills.” [B]
JESSICA THOMAS
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