Boy, I don’t think you quite get it yet— I’m essentially a glorified bum.
Was what I thought but didn't say when he mentioned that he had a hairdryer. He also expressed concern that he didn’t have another towel, didn’t have ladies shampoo, and that his room was a mess. The one thing I did pick up on his recommendation on the walk from the subway was a toothbrush, and even that felt like a silly allowance as I normally carry one in my backpack. Or I could have (and have in the past) used my finger to massage some toothpaste around my molars… or, without too much hesitancy I could have just used his toothbrush. I mean, we were making out… is it really that much different?! After all of the bumming I have done, I feel I am very adaptable, very hard to surprise, and definitely do not and have never needed a hair dryer. Besides, I had washed my hair hours ago at the bathhouse we were at; why would my hair need washing or even wetting for at least another few days?!
It was a cute series of little worldview clashes, coming from a caring and sweet place and not causing any harm. He was attracted to me, that was clear, but I wondered if it would hold up as the extent of my vagabond self came clear. “Which cologne do you like better?,” he had asked me in the shop as I twirled, dressed up in the $800 Game of Thrones-esq fur coat, too which I crinkled my nose and replied that I like my men smelly. Or rather, not bad smelly, but smelling of salt, of sweat. I used to retort to my first mate that he was stinking up the focsle with his “man perfume” when he would plaintively complain about my unshaven thighs.
I like to be able to walk into any cultural situation and not feel alienated and I do a good job at this masquerade. I can chill on a street corner swapping hitch hiking stories with bums one minute and talk eloquently with legislators over wine the next. I am the girl from a landlocked state who works on boats. I am currently a member at the most expensive gym in NYC and yet I subsist mainly off of left over charter cheese plates and in a week I will be homeless. I am the girl who wears hiking boots with her dresses.
All of these layers, and yet still at heart I am a rough and tumble hippy girl from the New Mexican mountains. I didn’t wear a bra until I was 14, and started wearing deodorant around the same time (“Mom, I don’t care if you don’t wear deodorant, I need to! I smell!”), and all through my standardly awkward teenage years I would regularly get naked with a phalanx of other unshaven hippies and lounge about in hot springs, all the while developing ploys on how to smooth out my own body to maintain some amount of that same confidence inside of the walls of high-school. I was that contradiction. I am that contradiction. And as much as I am boxing myself into an image with these descriptors, I hotly resent boxes and in my day to day play that chameleon card for all its worth. I roll out of bed and into yesterdays clothes and meet the day without brushing my hair, and yet I keep a mini skirt, make up and earrings in my backpack and can transform into head-turning date night girl inside of 2 minutes in a public bathroom. Or again— into an illusion of made-up date night girl. I will cary that facade with my confidence and poise, my tangled hair suddenly a style choice, but my skin will probably still taste of sweat and underneath the table my feet will be in hiking boots and the question of when will he get turned off? is an interesting one.
I take a certain joy in the contraction. That I rebel in part against the societal standards of beauty that so many women feel compelled or pressured to follow, and yet I am still desirable. Still attractive. Still confident. I put my legs in his lap with their scars and week’s worth of blond hair and he can’t stop touching them, comments on how smooth my skin is. We compare wardrobes and his clothes are expensive, well made and fit him perfectly. My raggedy collection is mainly an accumulation from thrift stores and hand-me-downs, a laughably small assortment as my clothes, along with all of my other possessions, have to be able to fit in a bag I can carry on my back for the next time I move boats. The next time I call myself homeless. The next time I’m a glorified bum in actuality. And yet I wear my clothes well as well— “they fit you, or you fit them,” my photographer said. They better, I thought; my five outfits and I have spent a lot of time together.
I suppose at a certain point it is a confidence thing. It comes down to that I am comfortable with myself, proud of my self and my body, and find feisty pleasure in being such a subversion of the “norm.” (To be clear here, who I am as a person I don’t presume to be “different” or “unique” inside of the circles that I frequent: the schooner-bum/sailing community, the Portland community, the climbing community… Inside of these my unpolished vagabond self is common and unremarkable. Perhaps only remarkable in that I’m not broke and can “swing the other way” and to a fairly competent extent blend into a more polished sophisticated “normalcy.”) And yet, I admit, I recently started shaving my thighs. I was tired of that battle, with society and with myself. Nothing in absolutes.
But, here in New York City I am different from the average man or woman I pass on the street or meet at the gym or on the boats; I am living a very different life. And playing the game of blending with the city and its life and its look while managing to also contrast it and still be noticed as an outlier, and having people be not so much deterred as fascinated…. has been a delightful game and education.
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