Slutever Page 4
In order to prove myself worthy to the squat board, I spent a couple of weeks crashing in Matthew’s bed, doing daily dumpster raids to show that I was a competent scavenger, and stealing cheap vodka from Lidl to prove my adeptness in petty thievery. I ripped holes in my tights, smudged my eyeliner, and stopped brushing my teeth, hoping to fit in. In the final vote, I was narrowly accepted. The people who didn’t want me to move in (I never found out exactly who), Matthew explained, were mainly worried that the building was just getting too crowded. There was only one bathroom, which meant eleven people sharing one toilet and one electric shower (there was no hot water in the building, but they’d installed an electric heater in the shower, which was powerful enough to produce lukewarm water for about three minutes once every hour). Plus, all the rooms were occupied. This meant I had the choice of either sleeping on a couch in the “living room”—a huge, open warehouse space, which clearly provided no privacy—or living in the stairwell. I chose the stairwell.
You know those really big factory stairwells that have a landing halfway up the story? Well, that landing was my bedroom. It was just large enough to fit a full-size mattress, with about a foot of space left over on one side. The staircase led from the second floor up to the roof, which luckily meant it was rarely used. I used the steps as shelves for my clothes. I hung posters of Louis Garrel and Billy Elliot on the walls. I bought a blue lightbulb. It actually ended up looking pretty cool. I mean, there were obvious downsides. For example, the cement walls and the high ceilings made heating the space nearly impossible, so during the winter it was freezing. Once, after sex, I watched Sam pull off his condom, and you could literally see steam rising off his cock, it was so cold. While my new, superficially bleak living situation clearly took a bit of getting used to, it wasn’t long before that small, dark, cold, mold-scented cement platform felt alarmingly like home.
Before I moved to London, I’d never had a gay friend or an artist friend. My idea of “alternative culture” was anyone who wore Converse. My idea of gay culture was Will & Grace, and my knowledge of art was limited to the watercolor landscapes of the Jersey Shore they sold at the local craft fair, which always ended up in our bathroom. Unfortunately, not all of us can be Gaby Hoffmann, growing up in the Chelsea Hotel with a Warhol Superstar for a mother, or Lena Dunham, honing her craft for oversharing among art world glitterati in a trendy Tribeca loft. After moving to London, sometimes I literally felt like I had grown up in a black hole. Like the time someone in the school cafeteria had to explain to me what sushi was. Or the time Sam told me he was in an indie band, and I thought that meant he was from India. Like, I was straight up basic. I had chunky Kelly Clarkson highlights. I wore spaghetti-strap tank tops. I had that awkward type of crunchy hair that never looks fully dry. I felt at home in a tanning bed. And then suddenly I’m living in an elevator factory with an Iranian asylum seeker, a Russian goth stylist, a woman who said the word “aura” like ten times a day, a performance artist who puked milk rainbows, and a bunch of other freaks, most of whom looked at me like I was the weirdo.
For the first time in my life, I would wake up every morning feeling excited and just completely in awe of the people and things around me. It was amazing how much life these people were living on essentially no money. I was dirt poor, but I somehow never seemed to notice. No one had anything, so everything was everyone’s. At one point I worked behind the bar at a pub for a few months, making £4.40 an hour, until I realized that it was literally possible to find more money on the ground at nightclubs than I made at my job, so I quit. Matthew and I would go out every night and get drunk on Lidl vodka that tasted like battery acid. We threw massive raves in our basement and built giant art installations to party in. Once, we built a giant papier-mâché vagina that you could crawl through to get to the “chill-out womb,” and if you wanted some privacy you could plug the entrance with a giant bloody tampon we made out of painted Styrofoam (hashtag period art, hashtag feminism). Our refrigerator was always overflowing with food (out of date, but still). There were always so many people around that you never got lonely. It felt opulent, somehow. “Penniless decadence” is what Matthew called it. The penniless part is pretty self-explanatory, but the decadence of it was multilayered—it was the leisure, and the lack of responsibility; it was the decaying grandeur of living in a derelict building; it was the irony of being totally broke but having a five-thousand-square-foot living room. There was nothing I wanted that I didn’t have. While it’s impossible to quantify these sorts of things, it’s clear to me now that this period of my life was fundamental in shaping who I am, in ways that are probably more extreme than I could ever imagine.
Being around Matthew also made me feel confident, like anything was possible. He made me feel like I could wear clothes that I picked up off the street, and as long as I had the right attitude, I would look cool. I was pretty chubby during that time—despite not actually being in college, I still gained the freshman fifteen, plus another fifteen for good measure. It was like my body intuitively knew that I was living in a cement warehouse with no heating, and it was preparing itself for winter by compelling me to eat street hot dogs at 2 a.m. every night. But by some miracle, I didn’t care about my weight. In high school, less than a year earlier, I’d cared so much about the way I looked. I was pretty much your average teen girl: I dabbled in anorexia for a while but ultimately quit when I could no longer explain why I kept fainting at basketball practice. Then I gave bulimia a test drive, but all the puking was causing these gross broken blood vessels to pop up all over my face. After my bulimia fail, I resigned to counting calories and just sort of casually hating myself, which was pretty much my MO up until I started squatting. But suddenly, after meeting Matthew and Co., I was heavier than I’d ever been, and I didn’t care. It was almost like I was too happy to even realize that I had put on weight. I also suddenly no longer cared about looking “pretty.” On a whim, I ditched my chunky highlights and shaved half my head, dyed my remaining hair neon blue, and let Matthew use a Sharpie to temporarily tattoo leopard print onto my naked skull. My uniform was a pair of dirt-caked Doc Martens, a ripped nightie, smudged makeup, and too much cleavage. I looked like an apocalyptic garbage whore and smelled like a combination of vodka and semen, but I felt great about myself. I remember once Matthew said something that really stuck with me. He said, “I don’t want to look hot so that people want to fuck me. I want to look powerful so that people believe in me. I want people to see me and think, ‘That person is free.’” And sure, it sounds sort of naive, but there’s a sentiment there that I still really respect.
It won’t surprise you that one of my biggest style inspirations was Courtney Love. At the time I didn’t know much about her, beyond her being the singer of Hole and Kurt Cobain’s baby mama, but I was intuitively drawn to her aesthetic and the tough, slutty, girly-girl attitude it projected. As has happened at multiple points throughout my life, I wasn’t aware of the political or feminist connotations of that style choice until way later. In her essay “Sluts and Riot Grrrls: Female Identity and Sexual Agency” (Journal of Gender Studies, 2007), Feona Attwood unpacks the politics of Courtney Love’s iconic style. She outlines how Love’s look subverts normative depictions and understandings of female sexuality.
Courtney Love, the most visible performer to be identified with Riot Grrrl, adopted a…“kinder-whore” look, combining very girly, sometimes torn, “babydoll” dresses with heavy and often smudged make-up; “a slutty, D.I.Y. subversion of the traditional Prom queen look.”
Kim Nicolini argues that the slut persona as performed by Love involved a rejection of both “Good Girl” and “Good Feminist” roles in order to “take all the mess of female sex and throw it into the public eye.” Combining pretty and ugly qualities; the babydoll and the witch, “the glistening sex doll and the screeching life buried under the pink plastic,” Love created an “attraction/repulsion dynamic” capable of making audiences question their attitudes towards female sexu
ality…This kind of performance, embodied by Love, but evident elsewhere in girl subcultures, is a complicated kind of alchemy, on the one hand transforming a position of shame and powerlessness into one of confrontation, yet on the other maintaining a sense of ambivalence and hybridity. The awkwardness of this is particularly evident in performances of the slut persona which often literally signify difficulty by appearing cheap, loud, ugly, noisy, broken, repellent, used and out of control, Other and abject, monstrous and possessed. The “mess” of female and femininity—essence and artifice—appropriates male space and behaviour in loud, angry public appearances. It disturbs the limits of acceptable feminine behaviour and the boundaries of heterosexual style and performance.
The way we dress is, of course, part of how we construct our personal narrative. It’s the clearest gesture of our desires, our identity, and how we feel about ourselves at any given time. And maybe dressing like a freak or a slut is just a normal youthful rite of passage, but at that point in my life, dressing like a Courtney Love impersonator felt like strapping on armor. It’s like how an actor puts on a costume to help get into character—in my trashed nightie, it was like I suddenly had permission to dance on tables and make out with guys on buses and just generally be an annoying hot mess—but one who was having a lot of fun.
The era of the elevator factory lasted just over a year. But all good things must come to an end—as must all squats. Eventually the owner took us to court, and soon we were on the streets. At this point, the squat crew largely dispersed. Most of them were older than me, and some went on to get real jobs and real houses. Some became homeless, some became famous. I, however, was still professionally figuring out my life, so I decided to join a different squat crew—a younger crew, some of whom I knew because I literally kept running into them inside dumpsters (it’s like the equivalent of a social club for freegans). This new squat was far less of a, shall I say, “structured” living arrangement. While the elevator factory had been a sort of avant-garde wannabe-communist wannabe-utopia, the new squat was more like living in a psych ward, if the psych ward was also a drug den where everyone was constantly having sex and giving each other lice.
For the next three years of my life, home was a dilapidated four-story hostel in southeast London. I doubt most sane human beings could inhabit a place so vile. Like in many squats, there was no heating or hot water, but that was the least of our problems. The floors were carpeted with empty beer cans and discarded Pot Noodle containers. Most of the windows were either smashed or covered in graffiti. In the living room, a permanent chandelier of flies hung from the center of the ceiling. There was so much junk in that room that we began stacking new junk on top of the old junk, forming large junk mountains that we had to literally scale in order to maneuver through the space. There was a big couch that sat crookedly atop a small couch, a birdcage big enough to fit a small adult, assorted mannequin body parts (a requirement of any authentic college-age living space), a collection of more than a hundred VHS tapes, and a constant rotation of bodies, most of whom I recognized, many of whom I didn’t. The air was thick with the scent of wet cigarettes and dried blood. This is where I spent some of the best years of my life.
There were between ten and fifteen of us who lived in the hostel, depending on the day—a ramshackle crew of drifters, losers, addicts, anarchists, and that special type of artist who never actually produces any art. One of my closest friends in the squat was Claire, a wispy nineteen-year-old ketamine dealer and aspiring prostitute. I kept trying to tell Claire that prostitution is rarely a profession that people struggle to break into, yet somehow she spent the six months after I met her trying to become a whore with no success. How is this possible? I wondered. The problem wasn’t the way she looked. She was really hot—long skyscraper legs, a shiny black bob, and these puffy red lips that always looked freshly sucked on. The problem, rather, was that she was an airhead. See, Claire came from a long line of hippie ravers. Whenever she would tell us a story from her childhood, it would start with something like: “During my first acid trip, when I was seven,” or “Back when we lived in a box…” I met her mother twice, and both times she was wearing fairy wings—like, at lunchtime. Claire once told me that it wasn’t until she started school and saw the other kids putting milk on their Cheerios that she learned most people don’t eat cereal with Coca-Cola. Because of stories like these, the rest of us in the house forgave Claire when she regularly asked us questions like “What’s a lobster?” or casually mistook Auschwitz for a shopping mall in Berlin.
There were a handful of other core squatmates. First there was Sebastian, who at twenty-five was the elder of the house. Sebastian had big, protruding teeth that looked like they were at war with each other (like most British people) and played guitar in a vaguely famous indie band (like most British people). Then there was Dirk, the gay kid with dyed green hair, who only wore green and brown clothing, because he wanted to look “like a tree.” Next was Rabbit, the lanky, Canadian bisexual who was obsessed with conducting satanic masturbation rituals using (supposedly) magical symbols knows as “sigils.” So basically he’d casually ask Satan for something he wanted, and then draw some squiggly lines onto a piece of paper and jerk-off onto it. After Rabbit moved in, it became commonplace to find a group of people masturbating in a circle in the living room, backed by a soundtrack of Peruvian flute music. Next was Sofía, the boy-crazy Colombian who dressed like every day was Coachella. I can’t forget Bea, the impressively flexible teenage ecstasy addict. And Dan, the bearded political cartoonist who never showered and whose dick gave me a perma–yeast infection. Kat, the argumentative Scottish anarchist, and her girlfriend Laura, an American synth musician who wore a skeleton costume pretty much every day. Dylan, a gay jewelry designer with a PhD in convincing straight boys to experiment with their sexuality. And last but not least, there were “the Czechs,” a group of Eastern European bike messenger graffiti stoner bros who lived in the hostel’s windowless basement. I’m not sure if all of them were actually from the Czech Republic, but one of them said he was at some point, and then the name just sort of stuck. The number of Czechs was always changing, but in general most of them had dreads, couldn’t speak English, and were on a constant rotation in and out of jail. It was a beautifully deranged little family, and I fell in love with them all.
They say that necessity breeds invention. This was more of a “boredom breeds idiocy” situation. As you might imagine would happen when you put a dozen unemployed twenty-one-year-olds into a minimansion, the hostel became a breeding ground for the absurd. One of my favorite squat memories is of the time Claire came up with a genius plan for how to keep the house clean with minimal effort. The answer was simple, she told us: We should get a slave. Obviously.
When she suggested this, all of us brushed it off, assuming it was just one of her brain malfunctions. But Claire insisted that, by the magic of the internet, she had found us a slave who was willing to clean up after us in exchange for the small price of being emotionally and physically abused. It sounded too good to be true.
Claire had happened upon the aspiring slave’s ad on Gumtree.com (the British version of craigslist) and decided to go and talk with the guy, bringing along Kat as moral support, aka security. They went to meet the slave at a local café—both wearing stolen thrift store blazers, on Claire’s insistence that it was a “business meeting”—to discuss how things would go down. While I can’t imagine that interviewing for the position of someone’s unpaid servant is a very rigorous process, the dude apparently passed with flying colors, and a few days later our very own slave showed up on our doorstep.
The slave was an Asian guy in his thirties who worked as a lawyer when he wasn’t cleaning strangers’ toilet bowls for sexual pleasure. At first it was amazing. He would come and clean for us once a week, and we didn’t have to pay him a dime. He’d just cheerfully scrub the floors while we lay around watching reruns of America’s Next Top Model, and every once in a while one of us wo
uld get up and whip him with a phone charger. We felt like we’d uncovered this incredible secret, like “Wait…why don’t more people have slaves? It’s such an efficient way of getting things done!”
At first, some of the people in the house didn’t realize that the slave didn’t actually live with us. At one point, while we were indulging in our Saturday afternoon ritual of drinking White Russians and playing charades, Dirk looked confused when the man came into the living room with a broom and dustpan.
“Why are you cleaning?!” Dirk yelled, horrified, as if the guy had just pointed a machine gun at us.
“No, no—that’s our slave,” Claire whispered, after which Dirk looked puzzled for a second, but then just shrugged it off, like I’m not even going to bother to ask.
At this point, I was still a BDSM novice. All of us in the house were. What we didn’t realize at the time, being newbies in the world of kink, was that while slaves don’t want to be paid money, they do want to be paid a lot of attention. We assumed that we could just be napping/unconscious while the dude dusted around us. Not so. Turns out, the turn-on isn’t cleaning; the turn on is being watched while cleaning. After a few weeks of coming over, the slave started giving us performance reviews, claiming that we were not engaged enough as proprietors. Naturally, we were outraged. This wasn’t the power dynamic we’d signed up for. But we didn’t want to lose him—I mean, the house looked better than ever, and we had come to appreciate the simple joy of not living in a literal pile of trash—so we decided to make more of an effort. Rather than just hitting the slave with random things we found on the floor, Claire stole some whips from a sex shop. I put on a leather skirt. Sebastian cut a hole in a garbage bag (the poor man’s latex) and wore it like a dress. We also got more involved in the slave’s creative process by making a specific list of tasks for him to accomplish. I recently found a photo of the list in one of my early blog entries. It read as follows: