The Cliff: Notes on Sex, Work, and Shoes

Part I

Wearing inappropriate footwear is a running joke of my life. Once, after being stranded in a snowstorm for hours somewhere between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City, the heavy white cloud that descended over my periwinkle blue ’96 Pontiac Sunfire lifted and I could see far enough in front of me to creep along the freeway, my towering stiletto hovering over the brake pedal. Hours later, I triumphantly pulled up to the modest brick house my family lived in from the years I was in seventh grade through high school, the longest we had stayed in one state and one place.

This is where my mom divorced my dad, after asking my permission late one night. Returning from a closing shift, I quietly unlocked the side door to find her sitting at the kitchen table, illuminated by a single light source like an Edward Hopper painting. The same table I often bumped into while silly dancing with my little sister, the table where I devoured warm tortillas dripping butter, cinnamon, and sugar, or plucked wrinkly grapes when my body turned against itself.

The kitchen table I would creep past when I drunkenly snuck in after a night out with my very adult friends, doing very adult things, while working my second real job at Barnes & Noble—a better fit for me than Old Spaghetti Factory, where the single portion of phony Spumoni only pseudo compensated for the insult of getting written up for daydreaming, not to mention accidentally spilling one too many soft drink refills on customers. You will not find strong spatial awareness on my résumé. I wanted to work as a waitress at Olive Garden, because I thought the uniform was sexy, but instead got hired as a busser at this uncool Italian chain with fake leather booths that always smelled like dirty mop water, as did the rags we used to wipe them down. As did the requisite squeaky black work sneakers I purchased from Payless and resented endlessly for their drab functionality. That is, until Barnes & Noble called me for an interview.

This job afforded me the minor pleasure of unregulated shoe selection, a small savings for college, as well as—soon after my high school graduation—threesomes and love affairs with coworkers I kissed for hours, on scratchy couches and car seats, tension building and giving in the heat between parted lips. That quiver of anticipation, a rush of heat condensing space and sound.

I was awestruck by my boss, who looked like a cross between Gillian Anderson on X-Files and Jennifer Beals in the L-Word, tall and striking, with tailored suits over partially buttoned white blouses hinting at black lace push-up bras. Handsome and gorgeous and swoony. There were older men, too, with scruffy beards, who tasted like cigarettes but I didn’t care, because I smoked back then, before vapes came along to obliterate any trace of allure left in the habit. I quit out of spite for the way vaping sutured nicotine to bro culture, like a blue pack of American Spirits to indie sleaze.

I pined over one handsome older man in particular, the one still in love with his ex, of course. He had wild curls, gesticulating arms, a warm smile that washed over you wave-like as his eyes lit up, mouth twisting into a secret, then wide grin. We had extended conversations about books and made out at work in the elevator from cash wrap to the second floor, which housed all my favorite sections—poetry and fiction, cultural studies and philosophy and music, although I wanted to chuck every damn Josh Groban CD permanently looping in my brain out the window, along with The DaVinci Code and whatever the fuck by James Patterson. My older love interest, we’ll call him Greg, shared my snobbish disdain for Dan Brown, a hill I’d still be willing to die on.

When Greg reminisced about the lingerie his ex-girlfriend wore that drove him wild, my heart flushed a familiar failure. Even so, that pain felt fresh, an intoxicating flash of another world. I wanted to wear the lingerie, maybe even break a heart other than mine. This was my introduction to sexiness as spell, as talisman, as soft revenge.

The older man also, by chance, reintroduced me to my estranged best friend from junior high, my first true love. At a work party spilling onto the front lawn of a house on a major street in Salt Lake City, Maddy and I made out on a swing set before she disappeared into the prison system—reunited briefly long after her mom separated us by sending her to another high school. Maddy’s mom used drugs to which both of her daughters were privy, but decided I was a “bad influence” in this regard. Maybe this needless blame wasn’t about generations of suffering distilled into a bottle of pain pills or a bag of party favors, none of which I even sampled until long after graduation, and even then, only a select few; maybe, in hindsight, she was afraid I’d make her daughter gay.

While Deee-Lite-loving Maddy, I imagined, was drowning in a sea of beige ballet flats with little bows and round toes, I longed for her goofy laugh and thick tongue skate shoes peeping out of low-rise JYNCO jeans. She was so cool, the most punk person I had ever met, growing up out of place in the Bible Belt and Mormon Mecca. A little weirdo with bowl-cut bangs, I was obsessed with reading, indiscriminately, billboards and cereal boxes and crinkled magazines, the mail-order encyclopedia I was ecstatic to receive as a gift.

My mom likes to tell the story of how, to her surprise, at a young age I recalled every detail of an article I read on Jane Goodall. She had asked for a summary because the New Yorker was not exactly grade-level reading material, so she was curious about the extent to which I digested it. The fact that I scribbled down random letters and wingdings for the word “the,” which I could never remember how to spell despite writing elaborate stories—fantastical ones about a clueless dinosaur going to an art museum and appreciating the art by eating it, and a little girl escaping into a magical forest through her bedroom window—may have contributed to my mom’s eyebrow raise.

Hyperlexia aside, I didn’t feel smart. I felt lost. I couldn’t follow instructions. And I couldn’t play Pogs at recess because I had to see a speech-language pathologist for multiple articulation disorders that I only recently learned are linked to the neurodivergence that would remain undiagnosed well into my adulthood. Despite my alleged first word boasting two syllables, as my mom swears it was “pickle,” I had a hard time articulating sounds, which my heavy lisp didn’t help. As a kid I went by the nickname Rosie, but introduced myself as Whoa-we Wee, leading to much confusion. I still spell out my last name, Reed, when prompted, weary of that confusion. For years, the word “cute” made me wince. Precocious little me wanted to be heard, not to elicit laughter. Maddy was an external manifestation of my hidden turmoil, my inner rebellion.

Meanwhile, after a brief wannabe punk phase—during which my grandma had to explain to me outside of Hot Topic that “pussy power” wasn’t the cat shirt I wanted it to be—I transformed into an earnest student, masking and people-pleasing down to every detail, from the collared shirts, knee-high socks, straightened hair, and straight As. Normal was the drag I wore out of a drive to survive, to be taken seriously—so, later, slutty was its liberated refusal, its necessary undoing.[1] Slutty as in strutting around with private textures, fishnets and strappy satin, feather peep-toe house heels,[2] for my own pleasure, slutty as in relishing that pleasure.

***

Case in point, on the drive home, when stuck in said snowstorm, I needed to pass the time and distract myself from the cold without draining my Pontiac’s already faulty battery. No smart phone, no reception, no visibility—just my unwieldy imagination, desire, body, shielded by bright shadows of snow.

My butt and thighs ached, though, from being cooped up in a car for well over half a day. After snow stopped swirling in sheets on my windshield, I buttoned threadbare Levi’s over lace and drove home with wide-eyed attention, careful to steer into the direction of tires sliding on ice. I knew to avoid the dangerous instincts of avoidance or over-correction, but every time I leaned into the skid, I felt a rush of something between joy and horror.

A hormonal cocktail of adrenaline, norepinephrine, and dopamine, I guess, to distill the senses and faculties needed for surviving crisis—or a respite for a brain and body that won’t stop buzzing. The stress hormone cortisol, which regulates the body’s “fight or flight” response, is a temporary substitute for dopamine, which people with ADHD lack. As a neurodevelopmental condition that significantly impacts executive functioning, ADHD has as its primary feature emotional dysregulation. Daily challenges stem from this dysregulation, more specifically, of two neurotransmitters involved in the body’s stress response, the hormones dopamine and norepinephrine. The Venn Diagram of trauma and neurodivergence—a fistful of accelerating hearts, restless limbs.

I slid out of my car seat wearing my favorite thrifted BCBG spiked stiletto heels with pointy toes and white patent leather embossed with thin black lines resembling a topographical map. Before I set foot on fresh powder, I jutted my lower legs out the door like the Wicked Witch of the West under that uprooted house, dramatically emphasizing my shoes.

“Really?” my mom exclaimed. She laughed, and I laughed, too.

“Mom, that’s just who I am!”

***

Years before, at a packed Baskin-Robbins in a Texas suburb, reaching toward the low speckled egg ceiling, my child body sat over six feet above ground on my father’s broad football-player shoulders. There was a brief interval of silence, the momentary retreat of lively conversation amongst the post-church crowd wearing their Sunday shoes. I decided this was a time to act decisively.

“I summon all the powers FROM HELL!!!” I belted, with gusto.

Unbeknownst to a crowd of mostly appalled faces, I was paying homage to Maleficent, who I thought was far more captivating than boring old Sleeping Beauty. So unrelatable. My mind was too alive, my imagination too vivid, my fear too real, sleep never came easy to me. I was no sleeping beauty, and I let everyone at a Bible Belt Baskin-Robbins know I had sinned, too.

My sin was remembering the wrong part of the story.

***

First there were oceans
then waves curled between 
our toes and tangled in our hearts
and tangles in my hair. 

You always helped 
with the untangling.
 
My feet may be callused 
from the distance and depth 
of so much time crossing
but you keep me soft. 

Your voice on the phone 
a seashell to my ear.

***

Had we been talking at the time, my mom wouldn’t have been surprised that I wore towering platform sandals to a January beach hike with the man I retroactively call Live Laugh Limp Bizkit. I almost didn’t hire him off TaskRabbit to install my bidet in December, because—if I’m being honest—I thought his black & white profile photo was MySpace cheesy, but he was cheaper than other folks with comparable reviews. I am too honest, unfortunately, because I blurted out my selection process to him before he got sprayed with (albeit clean) toilet water.

Little did he know, I spent the better part of an hour on the floor sobbing “I’m… just… so… tired!” prior to his arrival to undo the damage of my failed attempt to follow the Tushy instructions, because they make it seem so easy, with their annoying poop puns.

He had a neck tattoo, shitty politics, and Live Laugh Limp Bizkit tattooed on his lower leg. Unfortunately, he had me at neck tattoo. I was happy, although a little surprised, when he asked for my number as he was leaving.

I know, I know. But it had been more than a hot minute since my last relationship ended, and leading up to that breakup my ex’s idea of communicating his suppressed secret rage about me stripping—so I could leave a hostile work environment, to put it mildly—was to withhold affection until eventually dumping me over the phone from across the country after a monthlong absence. Not sure he thought that one through, because we lived together.

All of that to say, whenever a nurse taking my vitals queried, as per routine medical formality, whether I could be pregnant, I started exclaiming “I wish!” No one ever laughed.

I was supposed to be moving to LA with my ex, and freezing my eggs, just in case, because sometimes he proclaimed I was his soulmate and soon-to-be-fiancé, and sometimes he got mad at me for coughing in my sleep, or forgetting to take out the trash while working two full-time jobs, or not hearing him bark orders from another room. In the end, he left me with shared housing expenses he wouldn’t reimburse me for despite demanding that I quit stripping, my only plan for not going bankrupt after resigning from my university post.

Meanwhile, his signing bonus alone, for the corporate job he started that summer, was six-figures. We’re talking one hundred thousand dollars, which is roughly double the yearly starting salary offered to me at Old Dominion University, my first and last academic job. But I had taken the job I mean ultimatum, like a fool, because I didn’t want to lose him (and in a parallel universe, my career) and the life I fantasized we could live together.

Since I could never approximate who he wanted me to be, that life was no longer mine, and with an imminent career end coinciding with that loss, I felt gutted. Savings drained by a disastrous move culminating in my then work wife’s immediate abandonment of me, figuring out a new place to live and stable income to pay for it took priority over the fantasy of freezing my eggs, now a logistical absurdity. This is the time during which my mom and I weren’t speaking.

Thus, she wasn’t privy to my questionable shoes, and she didn’t know about the man my friends jokingly referred to as the Handyman Hooker, a name I called him in jest, in my playful bordering on belligerent flirtatious Sagittarius way. Despite the joke, which he had initially made himself, I tried to create some romance here and there, you know, excusing the fact that once he made fun of my orgasm face. Or that he kept pressuring me to create a Chaterbate profile, presumably to monetize for his own gain.

So here I was, hiking with Fred Durst’s mini-me. In my defense, I didn’t hear him say “hike,” only “beach,” thanks to delayed auditory processing. I therefore wore my platforms, brought my towel, sunscreen, a little makeup bag I take everywhere with a sparkly purple comb from Dollar Tree and emergency eyeliner, two books I would read but never at the beach, preferring to feel the sound of waves wash over me. For some reason I decided to put these sundry items in a rolling bag, like a mash-up of a backpack and stroller, usually reserved for hauling in groceries from the car. My first mistake.

We had to walk along a highway to get to whatever “secret spot” he had wanted to take me. I thought it would involve a romantic hidden cove, not sliding down a sandy knoll on my bare ass, lest I ruin one of my favorite fruit-themed outfits, a creamsicle-dyed knit minidress with neon oranges accentuated by bright green leaves that matched my bikini.

To his credit, the beach was secluded and beautiful and we shared a fresh pomegranate he carved in half with a pocketknife before taking some photos of the landscape absent any human presence. How many men had photographed everything in view but me, because I was a casual fling, an accidental rebound, a secret sidepiece, too much, not enough, or simply not seen at all.

As the sun started to set, Live Laugh Limp Bizkit dropped the news: he had no clue how to get us back to the top of the hill, which from below really looked more like, in fact was, a mountainous cliff. We frantically scanned for makeshift trails or stable ground to traverse the looming structure of sand, some loose, some hardened into sedimentary layers passively marking time not captured by clocks. Nothing. So we scaled a narrow ridge winding up toward the freeway, ad hoc climbers searching for jutting rocks. Except I’ve never been to one of those fancy climbing gyms. I was just freeballing it, hoping in the ongoing battle between my athleticism and my klutziness, my athleticism might win. My second mistake.

At one point, I felt the ground slipping beneath me, gravel and sand scattering, my entire foot twisting sideways in my platform sandal. Thank you, emo kids everywhere, for choosing Doc Martens, with their reinforced wide straps that don’t come unseamed from the sole, even when purchased secondhand, for surely I would have plummeted from a sudden loss of balance. I also have a habit of wearing shoes at least one size too big, because they seem more comfortable against feet made bony from years of eight-hour stretches standing in stilettos, save for cigarette breaks. All of this to say I was navigating the side of a cliff in unstable platforms, Live Laugh Limp Bizkit in front of me, begrudgingly hauling the damn rolling bag, which was now covered in sand, its sturdy waterproof fabric of hot pink hearts slashed open near the drawstring. He had poked fun at that bag all day. Now it was ripped, ruined, irrelevant.

Not soon enough after our beach excursion, and on the heels of a heated argument about Joe Rogan, which was more about Joe Rogan as hermeneutic, I realized his tattoo was not in the least ironic, but that his whole life, in fact, paid homage to the aggrieved white man sexism embodied in Fred Durst. Or James Patterson, who—despite being filthy rich, in part from the massive Barnes & Noble following I can personally attest to—recently accused the entire arts and entertainment industry of being “racist” toward old white men.[3] Remembering how the band’s hit “Nookie” from decades before was unfortunately a memorable moment in the musical landscape of my youth, I started reading an article about Woodstock ’99—when things were more equitable for oppressed white millionaires like poor Mr. Patterson—and had to stop almost immediately. Some things are better existing at the periphery of memory.

My third mistake: I wasted so much time being angry with my mom, when we had both been devastated by the devices of men. The gaps in our stories, born of those devices, were so large we fell through them, missing each other.

***

The night before sitting down to edit this piece, my YouTube suggestions play as I wash haphazardly stacked dishes, which spill over the sink onto the adjacent countertop. It’s beyond me how so many dishes accumulate when on a good day, I have prepared maybe one food item that resembles a proper meal. The city noise has sputtered into silence. The world is quiet, and I don’t want to take off my kitchen gloves, so I tune into the next video. I have stumbled into another serendipitous moment, like Kathleen Hanna’s dirty napkin and Chappell Roan swimming in a dusty Cheeto pool—weirdly specific metaphors I thought existed only in my specifically weird mind.

My jaw literally drops listening to an interview with Kate Spicer on the ADHD Chatter Podcast. Recently diagnosed, she expresses a painfully familiar mix of astonishment, regret, sadness, shame, self-doubt, and anger, particularly at how the neurodevelopmental condition so often elicits disbelief and disdain. I’m nodding along enthusiastically since, like Spicer, I grew up—to put it simply—a hot mess with a loud voice, cramming for major exams with flashcards and flash dance parties, thriving on deadlines and falling apart without them, needing carefully controlled vices to manage the incessant thought spirals cluttering my brain, and, of course, eating pudding with a fork. As it turns out, neurospicy people joke about a shared tendency to strongly dislike spoons, especially large ones. This is a mild expression of often overwhelming sensory sensitivities that can lead to shutdown.

As Spicer talks, I shake my head at yet another realization that what I thought were quirky personality traits were just ADHD. To be clear, I am neither a product nor a victim of my neurodivergence, which by no means describes or delimits my entire identity, but to deny its existence is a huge disservice to myself. She continues to conversationally recount experiences and feelings I relate to so intensely her words could be mine. I start to wonder if the joint I smoked—so my mind might quiet enough to sleep—has really messed with my brain. I listen again in the clarity of morning, just to be sure I hadn’t totally lost my mind. But it was the same story. The exact same story.

Podcast host Alex Partridge asks, as his closing question, “What’s the most impulsive thing you’ve ever done?”

Spicer indicates an abundance of examples before settling on one story. She exclaims, “I climbed a cliff once in a pair of espadrilles… That’s another thing that comes back to you. I could have died.”

She repeats, like an inner echo ricocheting off the walls of her mind, my mind, “I could have died.”

A palpable sullenness sets in for a beat before her story backtracks to humor, skillfully dissolving the discomfort of what in a different scenario may have been yet another off-putting overshare for which ADHDers are notorious. Comedy is a coping mechanism. Hands clawing at the air, she mimes snippets of the “sheer sandy cliff” experience before mentioning the sex that followed the fight that followed the unsafe climb with the unsafe man.

***

Months after breaking things off with the Handyman Hooker, I see a psychic who warns that promises made in the dark don’t often keep in the light of day. A dense cluster of betrayal follows me in the panoramic rear view of my past, but I won’t fully grasp the future significance of these words until I start stripping again, after a nearly yearlong break.

The psychic also tells me I am like a rose, in her words, “stunning and covered in thorns.” This year is my rose era, she says. I write it down. I read and reread these words.

I consider thorns. To be protected. To be desired in and for an armored disguise. Gawked and grabbed at, not held. Try me, try to take me out, try me out, make me spin, ask what I’m doing later. You’re talking to a shimmering shadow. I shine like a cartoon star at the tip of a sharp knife in a graphic novel or comic strip. I am a comic strip artist, a strip comic, a solo cartoonist, a cleaver of hearts. Teeth glinting, I draw cards, make shapes to fill men’s ventricles. Cleaving means to adhere to, to rend apart. I know this riddle. I consider the threshold of coming undone, what it equals: a tense but practiced balance between performance and person, a stuck emptiness to maintain a separation of space between mask and face, a doorway opening a deceptive box severing a body double in half, a flick of the wrist, a fool’s wager, blood and brain.

After work, I hurl myself home in a steel shell. I sit on the couch, rub the ache in my calves from hours of artful eight-inch heel hovering. I hold myself, placing palm to chest. The steadiness of my pulse an indexical sign, a stubborn incantation—urging me to repeat, I am safe now. I keep myself safe. Fingers spread across my bony sternum, I feel nothing but the heat of each heartbeat, its reprise a reminder of the intimacy of skin.

***

To be continued. . .

♡♡♡

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[1] The sluttiness I mean is not about my sex life, which for me remains a thornier story hindered by trauma and attachment wounding.

[2] In Rust Belt Femme, Raechel Anne Jolie beautifully describes the femme pleasure of house heels.

[3] I addressed the fallacy of so-called “reverse racism” in a previous footnote, because oppression operates through systemic hierarchies that affect daily lived realities. That is to say, racism (as it intersects with other vectors of power such as heterosexism, classism, ableism, etc.) is not about individual feelings or private prejudice: it is about institutional inequities and public policies. While of course imbricated in structures of power, prejudice is about feelings, and discrimination is about acting on those feelings. Such distinctions exist because the way we talk about racial justice matters!