'Good-Time Girl' Part 1 for April 4th

When you find that you don't love her/When all the glitter rubs off of her/I'll be waiting just a smile away...

Oh, hello, there—

Apologies for the tardiness of this newsletter. I was…occupied…in the Upper East Side.

The phrase “good-time girl” was first used in print more than eighty years ago; oddly enough, TIME magazine once ran a nightlife column, and an anonymous young woman was quoted in its May 25th, 1936 issue with this winking self-description.

“I’m a good-time girl. Clothes, music, lights, dancing and liquor—what else is there when a girl is young?”

I can’t help but summon her to mind—some loose, burnt curls wafting weakly from the lip of her cloche, maybe a lick of downturned liner to emphasize how smart and dark her eyes are. A thin coat obscures torn stockings, ones she knows she can’t replace. She’s nattering at this reporter about hedonism against the tattered backdrop of Depression-era oblivion, a fissure so deep and wide it will subsume her DNA and teach her body lessons that tired immigrant ancestors sacrificed everything to censor. She’s witnessed the kind of death America promised wouldn’t happen here; she’s held sickness like a spit-slick totem under her tongue, she’s dropped weight, she’s gotten wise.

She’s also right. What else is there when a girl is young? No jobs, no food, no escape from the dingy, dust-dumb city. Husbands and presidents won’t fix things—the movies lied. She’s stitching heart-shaped patches over threadbare holes in every dress she owns. She’s drinking bathtub gin that burns her throat. She’s smiling with infected teeth. She’s sucking dick. There will be plenty of time to dance when the world is over.

In 2022, I’m sifting through alternatives to hope. I’m wearing less, going out more, weaving analgesic tapestries from stolen or abandoned threads. I’m a good-time girl and an end-time whore and an aging barfly and a motherfucking mercenary, so when a beautiful not-quite-stranger holds my face and tells me it’s okay to be scared, I’m quiet, for once.

…Wait, is everybody else scared, too?

The ancient Greeks called the female followers of Dionysus “maenads”—literal translation, “raving ones”. Draped in fawn skins and ivy wreaths, they caroused in loud, intoxicated throngs, screaming, crying, cumming, thrashing, frenzied by substance-addled psychosexual zealotry. In Euripedes’ classical drama, The Bacchae, Theban maenads reward King Pentheus’ slander of their savior by tearing him limb from limb in the thick, wet dark of the forest. Wine mingles with blood to paint their passions crimson. 1920's linguist Walter Friedrich Otto declared of The Bacchae, “Fire does not burn them. No weapon of iron can wound them, and the snakes harmlessly lick up the sweat from their heated cheeks. Fierce bulls fall to the ground, victims to numberless, tearing female hands, and sturdy trees are torn up by the roots with their combined efforts”.

In the introduction to Anne Carson’s 2017 translation of the play, she writes,

“Look at these poor passionate women/ who worship this god/ the Bakkhai/ destroyers of livestock/and local people/ and Pentheus the king/ They had a prior existence once…This is a world before men./Then the posse arrives/and violence begins./What does this tell us?

The shock of the new/will prepare its own unveiling/in old and brutal ways.

RAGE IS BORN OF GRIEF.”

God, I don’t want to be the booze-numb sum of broken parts. I don’t want to be too wounded to make good stuff or love the way I know I can, the way I used to. I want to be a hot, wet horseman, bouncing gleefully towards hellfire on bright pink spurs.

And, fuck, I don’t want to cope or to write about coping or heal or write about healing or meditate or self-actualize or mine my stupid fucking soul or grow more scar tissue or keep my word. I want to cackle hard in a loud, close basement. I want to kill the King with ten of my closest friends.

Good-time girls get obsidian shoulders and steel-toed cunts.

Good-time girls move pretty in low light.

…Is everybody else scared, too?

Oh, you’re not gonna get what you need/ But baby I have what you want/ Come get your honey….

Thank you for reading, subscribing, etc. ‘Good-Time Girl’ Part II will be out tomorrow.

-B