07-19-2015, 10:35 AM
Roxy Cotton ~ Twilight Sunbathing -->
My eyes are closed, but the hum of the coffin-shaped tube fills me everywhere. I feel it vibrating in my skull, buzzing in my teeth. The purple light pushes itself through my eyelids, leaving specters of memories to dance across my vision while I lie there, unmoving, waiting for the timer to sound.
I see horrific things when I’m taken away from my distractions. Away from the manufactured therapy tools we all use every day. The cell phones and tablets and Apple watches and so on and on and on. Here it’s just me, alone in my skin.
The purple shadows shift and form my stepfather, standing over my bed and breathing heavily, unaware that the little girl mummified in sheets beneath him is only pretending to sleep and doing her best to not cry out and wake her little sister.
They float into a man at a bar, handing me a drink that should have never accepted. A vague, drug-addled recollection of a face over me, close to my own, distorted both by exertion and by memory loss.
I see the love of my life, “Loverboy†Vinnie Lane, but not with a smile on his face and a championship belt held high over his head. No, when I’m alone in this ersatz sensory deprivation chamber, I am haunted by the Vinnie Lane that most don’t see, or don’t see often. The injured, beaten, battered Vinnie Lane. The wounded warrior. Blood pouring from his split scalp, eyes dilated from concussion after concussion.
I see the machines keeping Vinnie Lane among the living, and then I’m startled when the timer ends and sounds like a flat-lining heart monitor.
There are tears in my eyes as the top of the tanning bed opens with a futuristic whoosh, and my toasted skin feel crisp and tight as I sit up and swing my legs over the edge, finding my sandals with my toes in the dark.
I dress myself and fix my hair in the gleaming metal of the slowly-cooling bed, and then the first thing I do is find my cell phone and scroll through the outside world one screen at a time. I need to know what’s going on without being a part of it. I need to be connected to the circulatory system of the world, the internet, and have it breathe life into me as surely as the blood in my veins does.
What was Kim Kardashian wearing? What was her step-father, Caitlyn, doing that day? What were Taylor Swift and Katy Perry saying about one another? What is the newest weight loss miracle? The latest clear skin recipe? The best and the most and the longest and the hardest and the Cosmopolitan secrets to make him roar?
Where was the hospital calling to tell me he’d woken up?
Or that he wouldn’t?
In the twenty minute session on the bed I’d received 14 texts, seven from John Black which get immediately deleted and one from Thunderbolt X which is the same as every other day, “did Vinnie wake up?â€
“No.â€
I don’t know why I speak out loud as I type the single word and send it back to him, a rote response that has grown to a Pavlovian exercise in classical conditioning. Less than ten seconds after hitting send I receive the same reply as always. “Okay. Thanks Roxy.â€
I don’t stand and turn on the overhead lights just yet, opting instead to only see myself, glowing in the dying ultraviolets and the rectangle of my phone’s screen. My little window to real life.
Eventually, as the bed dims down like a setting sun, my skin still reflecting off the light it absorbed like the face of the full moon, I find Nico LaVey’s newest addition to noise pollution.
“Jesus…â€
Stunned silent throughout the two and a half minutes of my life that could have gone to better use getting my asshole waxed, I sit with a loosened jaw and listen to him.
Finally, he stops talking and his promo simply switches to some sort of meme video with a scrawny-looking nerdy boy trying to be funny while singing about the real monster in his closet – his sexuality. The way Nico disappeared I actually thought for a moment that it was a newer version of a YouTube ad, which made sense to me considering Nico probably doesn’t earn a cent for the XWF and the only way he can get his vignettes aired on the network is to sell ad space… but no, it was the end.
I suppose I should respond, and so I clear my throat and hit record on my iPhone 6.
“Hey Nico… real quick, I drink skinny soy lattes, with no whip. Da Vinci didn’t paint the Mona Lisa with a fat brush did he? A work of art is exactly that. Work. I just got done putting the finishing touches on my Perfect Ten looks. What did you do today? Sit in a back room alone and play with your toys? We all know that Craigslist escort you rented to play the part of your wife only stuck around until her sixty dollar hour ran out, don’t we? You can have the full fat, full foam caloric nightmare fuel you chug down daily all you want. That’s why in a few years I’ll still look like an angel while you’ll look like Chaz Bono.
Let me explain to you exactly why you are just another example of everything wrong with a male-dominated society. Look at you. You do everything in your ability to try and be what you think is ‘manly.’ You cover yourself in sexist tattoos, like a walking poster for Sailor Jerry, for one. How many oversized sets of tits are on your skin, Nico? How many little fantasy drawings of women who, if they were real, would never come anywhere near you? I bet you’d never think of anything as original as treating your body like a temple to be worshipped, would you? Look at me. Healthy. Glowing with bronzed vibrance. Curves molded through years of hard work. Sure, I’ve had my share of cosmetic enhancements, but those are just the same as a man putting on his tie to go in to the office. It’s just a part of the uniform, baby.
You live your life in a comfort afforded to you by other members of your gender, not you yourself. You can’t stack up to the other men, and you decide to make yourself feel better by putting women down. You’re just another in a long line of little girls born with the wrong genitals who grew up angry at the woman inside of them – so you take it out on us, the pretty ones. The ones that, deep down, you really wish you were.
You don’t think I feel your jealousy when you see me walk by? The way your eyes linger on my strong calves when I wear my six inch stilettos? You play it off like you’re staring at my ass, because in a locker room full of over-hormoned andro-boys it’s more socially acceptable for you to marginalize and objectify me than to admit that you wish you could have a pair just like mine.
The thing that really sets you apart from the rest of the self-hating misogynists out there is that you’re just blissfully ignorant about it. Oh, to you there’s no such thing as a wage gap in modern America. There’s nothing wrong with a cadre of 80 year-old white men telling me what I can legally do with my own body. It’s perfectly fine for you to walk around not even knowing basic facts like what “slut shaming†is, right? You think I coined the phrase, Nico? Unfortunately not, because the sagging old balls of American alpha society made it necessary for others to do that for me.
Or how about the fact that you go on and on about an “XWF Women’s Division,†which doesn’t even exist? Where is this women’s division? Where is the women’s championship? There are just women. Women trying to struggle their way through a system designed by and for men, like a microcosm of the life we live outside of the ring as well. Knuckle-draggers like you thump your beer bellies like gorillas and bark about how that’s what equality means, right? We all have to fight the same fight to reach the same goals? But you’ve never started out with a handicap, Nico. You’ve never been born into a caste that was already considered below the other 50 percent.
Nico, when you finally find the courage to fully make the transition you’re heart and soul are yearning for, I hope you find these truths to be self-evident. That all men aren’t created equal, but that they, in a rare hive mind of agreement, decided all men were at least more equal than all women. Once you trade that patriarchical way of thinking in for a brand new set of titties, maybe you’ll understand Face it... your daddy didn't give you away because he thought you were 'too dangerous' due to violence. He thought you were 'too dangerous' to the image of a testosterone-laden boys' club.
But hey, I’ll give you credit on one thing. Those skinny jeans you were wearing looked pretty good. I might go out and get Vinnie a pair. Do they come in men’s?
Hugs and kisses, Nico.â€
And so I end the video with a big smooch to the screen, batting my perfect lashes as the bulbs finally go dark in the bed behind me. Nightfall in the tanning room. The lantern of my cell phone finds me my way home.
Roxy Cotton ~ Twilight Sunbathing -->
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