The tent diaries 6

“On such a trip as mine, so much there is to see and to think about that event and thought set down as they occurred would roil and stir like a slow-cooking minestrone.” - John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

I was wrong about Wednesday's post being my final tent diaries entry. I remember I wrote this kind of sloppy epilogue after I returned to Sarasota. 

People who had followed my journey in the newspaper said I ended things so abruptly with no tidy conclusion or rewarding epiphany. Of course by then it was too late. I had hogged full-page spreads in the newspaper for six weeks. So for myself and my friends I wrote this, a little thank you note. 

I was feeling pretty sappy and as usual, verbose. 

--

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

The Oregon Coast & Thank You
Just did the dishes. Zac cooked bean burritos for dinner tonight. I cut up cubes of cheese and tomatoes. We listened to This American Life. Max won cards. Rachel drank White Russians. Cubbie licked Sadie's ears and teeth and I told some stories about Oregon and Wyoming using accents and flailing hand gestures.

I reached Bandon, Oregon at ten o'clock at night and if I had approached the end of the continental United States the coast of Oregon gave no warning. Like a security blanket, high bluffs and forests shield the Oregon Coast. When you drive from Klamath Falls to Bandon there are only subtle hints of the Pacific Ocean. The dark is pitch dark. (So much of coastal Oregon reminded me of a previous trip to Rhode Island.) I S-curved down highways and through national forests. I constructed in my head the image of the United States. The shape of my country, kind of like a chicken breast.

I rolled down my windows. The night looked like it might feel cooler and it did. I could smell it. The coolness and the ocean. The air felt like cellophane. I hung my arm out the window, flattened my palm and let the resistance turn my fingers into peninsulas. Peninsulas like Florida. I missed Florida. For the first time since moving to Sarasota three years ago, I had, during a phone conversation with Joe, called Sarasota "home." Used the word without hesitation. I missed my home. I missed Joe. This I was sure of. So many nights I narrowed my eyes like Matilda, beaming him into my tent whenever I felt lonely or I wanted to share something spectacular with him. Like, "Hey didja see those wild horses humping each other today?"

I missed my friends and that became more apparent as I went about my daily business without once laughing. I love to laugh goddamit! Without human company when do you laugh? What's there to laugh about? What does your laugh sound like when you're alone in your car, your tent, on the side of a dirt road? It sounds psychotic that's what. Lunatic. Laugh alone sometime without a television on, or a radio station dialed in, or a good book on your lap. Laugh without any of these devices and you're bat shit crazy.

I laughed anyway. With my hand out the window and my fingers like peninsulas, I laughed. Cubbie poked his head out the window and left it there for some time until I took a corner too hard and jolted him back into his seat. If the trees weren't so high I'd have seen stars.

Route 101, the Pacific Coast Highway, runs like a braided ponytail up the coast. I reached it and turned left. I had never seen the Pacific Ocean and now at every traffic light I craned my head out the window — was I there yet? Would I drive off the United States like Thelma and Louise? I could hear the crash of water on rocks. Crashing like tambourines! It was ten o'clock at night and I had traveled the width of my country. Sound the trumpets. Yet no trumpets would sound.

I would reach Bandon, where thanks to Joe I'd manage to get a $200 hotel room for the $60 military rate. Good luck? Good karma? Did I deserve either? I was so sick of the sight of myself. People had treated me so kind along the way. They were what I had expected — good, kind, curious and eccentric. How I like my people.

Before I left Sarasota my coworkers at European Marble handed me an envelope containing $200 in twenty dollar bills. My tent, my table, my cooler, the picnic basket, the propane burner, boxes of couscous, cans of tomato soup … all of them given to me by friends and coworkers. 

On the night before I left Sarasota Zac hosted a dinner where he cooked my favorite author's favorite foods. John Steinbeck's beer milk shakes. Hemingway's gazpacho. He invited my friends over and we toasted my trip from a plastic table set up in our apartment parking lot. Then he handed over a brown paper bag filled with Shell gas station gift cards. The cards took me as far as Chicago, and I saved one for my return trip. Redeemed it in Dade City, Florida. As I pumped my last tank of gas, I kissed the magnet strip. 

The unfolded roadmap on my wall with thumbtacks in it had become more dream than journey. More challenge than vacation. A rite of passage in my own head and in no other. The Mormons go on a two-year mission. I drive alone from one coast of the Unites States to the other.

In Estes Park, Colorado I'd treat myself to a mandarin chicken salad, a People magazine and a Blockbuster movie courtesy again of my boyfriend, who would treat me again to chicken fingers and curly fries at a diner with a name I wished I remembered in Bear Lake, Utah.

In Boise, Idaho I'd eat Cracker Barrel mac and cheese on Susan Holsing, a former European Marble coworker, who bestowed upon me a Cracker Barrel gift card that, if I continued to eat $3 mac and cheese off the kid's menu, would get me from Tampa to Portland.

Today in Sarasota, I met Rog and Ricci for coffee at Starbucks where, thanks to Jason and Jess, I treated us all to iced coffees in the titty-sweltering humidity.

So! This is the last blog. Finito. I did it. I write way too much anyway. I use too many metaphors and too many similes. I abuse similes like a drunk abuses– fuck, see.

I'm listening to the CDs Teisha gave me in Springfield, Missouri. Cubbie will be getting a bath soon. The walls in my bedroom are empty, save for an old drawing and my map of the United States with the thumbtacks in it. I'm debating whether or not to donate my bed to Goodwill as the house I'm moving into in a few weeks is fully furnished. I like my bed. It's a nice bed. Pillow top mattress. But it's a bed. It's stuff. A thing.

I guess what I'm getting at (what I was getting at 1,000 words ago) is thank you. Thank you to everyone who helped me along the way. People are better than stuff, better than places, and I'm ecstatic once and for all to be back in Sarasota with my people.

Thanks for reading.

The naked part was easy.

This is a story I wrote for my paper that was scooped before publication by the big hairy daily in town. Since it never saw the light of day, here's an unfinished version: 

STRIPPERELLA, Feb. 18, 2008

Let’s play a word association game. I say a word. You say what immediately comes to mind.

I say pole. You say north.

I say dance. You (maybe) say shake.

I say pole dance. You say stripper. (It’s OK. It doesn’t mean you snap ones under garter belts on the weekends.)

Unless you’re a firefighter and your association with poles is of the lifesaving variety, most people hear pole dance and think stripper.

You’re not alone in this conjecture. Even Nicole Phillips, the instructor of Cherry Blossom Pole and Exotic Dance Fitness gets inundated with stripper jokes whenever she talks about her new teaching gig. 

Curious. I decided to take her class.

Beam me up hottie.

Before reporting for pole duty, I Google it first.

Pole dancing, according to the Wikipedia entry, requires muscular endurance, coordination and sensuality. Several hits later I discover that pole dancing is also the next big thing since Richard Simmons sweated to the oldies.

It was exactly one year ago that The New York Times ran a story on how pole-dancing parties were dethroning Tupperware parties in the Jersey suburbs. I dubiously eye my salad in a Tupperware container. Smirking, I think if this thing catches on like Tupperware, I’ll be buying my Aunt Shirley stilettos for Christmas.

I run to the office bathroom, change out of my work attire and into something more aerodynamic, something more pole-worthy.

Phillips’ class is held every Friday night in Rosemary Court, a colorful klatch of cottages off Central Avenue in Sarasota’s Rosemary District. Before I go any further suffice it say this is not where I expected to pole dance.

Rosemary Court is adorable with its babbling Zen garden in the middle of a semi-circle of clapboard cracker shacks dedicated to wellness. Yoga. Pilates. Meditation. Aikido. Outside the semi-circle of holistic empowerment, Central Avenue still tries to catch up. Since we’re talking sexuality here, lets just say that when Sarasota bloomed into adulthood the Rosemary District hit puberty.

As I walk past the Zen garden and through the door marked “Pole and Exotic Dance Fitness” I imagine the voice of the Rosemary District cracking as it says, “Wait for me guys. I’m on my way.”

 The Clark Kent factor. 

Phillips is tiny, lithe, like a portable pole dancer. Like someone you might hire to baby-sit your kids. I had expected someone more, I don’t know, burlesque?

She works at a Sarasota engineering firm where she spends most of her days seated quietly behind a desk. She says when she started pole dancing two years ago she felt like she was leading a double life. Typist by day. Pole girl by night. 

“It’s like my superhero personality,” she says, giggling. “Only I know I can do this super cool thing. At night it’s kind of like I come out of the phone booth.”

From second grade on Phillips, 26, was a competitive cheerleader, but she tired of most fitness routines and dabbled in yoga, Pilates and the gym. But all of these, she says were such a chore.

How the pole entered her life is as non-sexy a story as choosing a college major. She researched it on the Internet, purchased a pole for her house and practiced for six months before contacting Vertical Dance, a school out of England often credited with pioneering pole fitness.

Like any fitness instructor, Phillips wanted legitimate certification so she completed a six-month program over the Internet, turning in written exams and session plans, student teaching pole fitness classes and performing routines via web cam.

“It was something that was important to me. I’m not just some girl doing that pole thing,” says Phillips.

In November she started offering pole lessons to the public. Surprisingly she wasn’t the only lass in town looking to spin. One Sarasota woman celebrated her 59th birthday with a pole party.

“I hope I celebrate my 59th birthday with a pole party,” Phillips says.

 

Idle hands make farting noises.

The pole is slippery from my sweat. And thanks to the wall of mirrors that spans the front of the room I can't escape the fact that I move more like a mechanical bull.

The amateur class consists of five women 40-ish in age, all of whom ask me to not identify them. Pole dancing has a bad reputation they say, which baffles me because a.) all of them are way better than me at this and b.) pole dancing is supposed to be empowering not humiliating.

One woman, we’ll call her Dallas (her idea, not mine) signed up for Phillips’ six-week session in January. Beaming and sweating Dallas confesses she lost 14 pounds in Phillips’ class.

“I’m a powerful woman,” says Dallas. “So this is an opportunity for me to get in touch with that other softer side.”

Turns out Dallas is a motivational speaker in town. She travels up and down the Gulf Coast pitching her inspirational two-cents to salesmen in Sarasota's male-dominated boat industry. 

“You don’t dress like a girl. You don’t talk like a girl,” says Dallas of her day job. “You kind of have to address the guys on their own wavelength.”

I praise her for stepping outside her comfort zone and then foolishly attempt a cross-legged fireman spin mid-conversation.

As I spin, I hug the pole like I’m a toddler clinging to my mother’s legs. Be sexy, I repeat. Slither. Wither. Be Demi. Be Elizabeth Berkley. Be Madonna! TLC’s Red Light Special comes on and I shake it off. I attempt one more serpentine motion with the pole between my legs and a death grip above my head, and as my clammy palms make their way down the steel beam a farting noise triggers immediate rubbernecking and at least one eye-roll from a woman in the class.

 Kyle, my coworker and cameraman, smirks and snaps a picture for the story.

Goddammit. It was my hands, I want to shout. My hands! But I don’t because that would be Turrets of me, so I step aside to make room for Dallas since she and I are sharing a pole.

“Ah,” she says grimacing. “It’s you whose been making the pole so sweaty.”

Great. I’m certifiable slime. I run to the bathroom to wash my dirty hands while Phillips, at the front of the class, demonstrates a Cirque Du Soleil bridge move. 

When I return, I sit the next move out and hide behind my Bic pen, scribbling notes in a reporter’s pad. In the margins I write things like: sux hairy monkey balls, strippers need raises, go to Cheetah Lounge tonight and bring fifties.

Epilogue.

Three days later my arms were still sore. I felt like I bench-pressed my coworkers. No, I felt like I bench-pressed my coworkers whilst they polished bowling balls dressed in chain mail. And to think I clumsily swung around a strippers pole in front my coworker Kyle, who photographed the whole sorry display for the paper — spandex, fart noises and all — only to have the story scooped Monday morning by a schlubby male Herald Tribune reporter.

Oh the humanity.