A Gallery of Glinting Teeth

Part II of “The Cliff: Notes on Sex, Work, and Shoes”

Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility.

—James Baldwin, “Go the Way Your Blood Beats”

Dear lovelies,

I’m excited to share Part II of “The Cliff: Notes on Sex, Work, and Shoes.” You can read Part I here:

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As I write and share pieces of my memoir, I’m still sorting out how to recount some experiences that feel vital to its trajectory—literally speaking, from college professor to exotic dancer—with a deep commitment to protecting the more sensitive stories involving close relationships. I therefore chose to put some of Part II behind a paywall; the writing feels too intimate to share publicly just yet.

Please consider a paid subscription to support this project; or, as always, message me for free access if the cost isn’t doable for you right now (no explanation needed, of course). You can also support my writing by sharing, quoting, and restacking it, or clicking on the heart button at the bottom of the post. Each lil heart truly gives me the warm fuzzies.

I know I say this often, but I’m so so grateful for all of you, paid and free subscribers alike. To express my appreciation, I created a playlist of moody music that sets the tone for this three-part series:

xx,

A.

[CW: brief reference to SA]

***

I scream while losing my footing, fumbling for a boulder or branch to tether me to the unstable sandy mountainside. Live Laugh Limp Bizkit, the man with whom I’ve been sleeping since he installed my bidet a few weeks prior, whips his head around. As he registers the genuine desperation in my eyes and tone of voice, he scoots back in my direction to give me a hand. He may be a jerk but he doesn’t, in fact, want me to fall to my death in front of him, impaled perhaps by a tangle of thorns.

Eyes wide with the sheer distance between my vibrating body and the dense surface of wet sand below, I keep sliding my butt toward him, one foot skating to the next, smelling stress hormones in my sweat, phalanges clutching, cleaving to a frantic desire to survive, a drive both terrible and giddy.

***

Our beach day was the closest Live Laugh Limp Bizkit and I ever came to a date. Unsurprisingly, given the preponderance of unavailable people I’ve historically been drawn to, this man had a big X scrawled in tattoo ink on his ring finger to commemorate a rocky divorce—and a general leeriness toward women. But a man who would casually, neutrally, refer to women as “bitches” is, in my opinion, a preferable variety of sexism to the “but I’m a feminist” kind. The former sexism is sort of in your face, but often easily disarmed, harmless, whereas the latter is more performative, insidious.

I’ve dated enough self-proclaimed feminist men to know the affective limits of such declarations, the litmus test of which is the untenable “overly emotional” girlfriend whose tears men suture to manipulation because feeling is a cryptic thing, an unfathomable forgery scribbled in blood and breast milk. The “hysteric” with a disturbed womb, the “angry feminist” with a vagina dentata, and other mythical tropes function to obfuscate the relationship between gender-based violence and state power, or how daily lived realities of heteropatriarchy, in concert with and articulated through U.S. Empire and global racial capitalism, might indeed give rise to messy emotion, fanged feeling.¹

It is exhausting, dealing with the obliviousness of a man who does not realize the majority of femme, queer, and nonbinary people hearing his commentary on sexual assault are survivors of it, that most are traumatized not by a stranger but by someone they knew and trusted. Such a man might not make a Cosby joke in mixed company, at least sober, but throws around the word ‘rape’ without grasping how it can quicken heartbeats, avert eyes, tense muscles.

No, the word isn’t a trigger, not in the psychological sense of directly recalling traumatic memory relived in the body. In my own mouth or off the lips of others who know it is not just a word—but a trace or haunting one survives by trying to forget, an individual memory, a web of intergenerational experiences, an institutional mode of domination wielded unevenly by structures of power—the word has gravity.

Paradoxically, that gravity unburdens me of its weight; which is to say, I can stomach the word when couched in care. But it’s a gut punch, the way it’s often used—the casualness, the flippancy.

Once I tried explaining this to Live Laugh Limp Bizkit, in abstract terms, after he made a rape joke.

“What?” Lackadaisical, bare feet hanging off my bed, eyes fixed on his phone. “It’s not a big deal. It’s just a joke.”

I spin around, leaving the room, dizzy with rage. “Easy for you to say!” I shout from the bathroom, wondering if he even understands what I just told him.

I realize that I hope he doesn’t.

***

Critique should not be confused with condemnation. Harmful hexes on human personality are not fixed, unmovable. People across the spectrum of situated identities can choose to move through the world and build relationships differently, to lean into what Margeaux Feldman calls “hysterical intimacies.” In their words:

“Hysterical intimacies reveal the ways in which the oppressions we experience do not come from our individual shortcomings, but rather are the direct result of the structures of oppression that produce great trauma. Hysterical intimacies recognize that interdependence enables us to resist and heal from the systemic and individual traumas that have made us sick. Within the landscape of hysterical intimacies, the sick person receives the care and intimacy they have been denied.”

Poetry is part of the landscape shaping transformative ways of being together, of assembling new possibilities that unclench fists, uncurl fingers. For instance, Nayyirah Waheed’s Salt beautifully maps an erotics of non-hierarchical relationality in the face of trauma. She writes: “i want more ‘men’ / with flowers falling from their skin,” … “flowers pouring from [their] chest.”²

***

I recall two stories I wrote as a child. One, about a little girl escaping through her bedroom window into an unknown expanse of blossoming undergrowth. Another, about the impact of a dinosaur’s destructive drive in an art gallery, cluelessly puncturing canvas with sharp teeth. The all-too-human impulse to render illegible what one desires. Picket fences as pocketknives. To protect and project our deepest fears, inexplicably and inextricably tied to something knottier than an oversimplified story about hate’s innate iteration—bound not to the aftermath of betrayal, but to the terrifying act of loving in the face of it. The weight of it. Betrayal is a backhanded confession of one’s limits to loving another.

Toni Morrison explains, “People always tell me that I am writing about love. Always, always love. I nod, yes, but it isn’t true—not exactly. In fact, I am always writing about betrayal. Love is the weather. Betrayal is the lightning that cleaves and reveals it.”³

Betrayal, the sudden apparition of an apparently unbearable responsibility to preserve the safety of our precious pieces, fragmented into fangs, repurposed as art objects. Desire is an escape artist in a gallery of glinting teeth.

***