Sunday, February 24, 2008

Candy Girl



A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper by Diablo Cody


I was seduced into reading this book after seeing the movie Juno. I thought the offbeat comedy pretty well summed up our wacky anything-goes world of 2007, yet it had an upbeat ending that buoyed your sense of hope. It seemed to say, Yes, life is a chaotic whitewater ride in which we constantly crash against boulders, but even if we fall overboard, we can usually climb back on board, shake ourselves dry, and keep on going––and later on we can laugh and tell stories about it. That, to me, is the magic of Juno, and the reason it so unexpectedly has caught the public's attention.

Anyway, afterward seeing the movie I was surprised to learn the author was an erstwhile Minnesota girl (who sometime hung out at the Tonka Lanes in Saint Louis Park, about a mile from where I live). I was further surprised to learn about her short-lived career as a stripper in Minneapolis, and I wanted to know how a person went from being a stripper to a famous Hollywood screenwriter. Still more intriguing—what made a girl with a typical Midwestern upbringing want to become a stripper in the first place?

After reading the book, I'm not entirely sure I have my answer. But I'm not really sure Cody does either. But I do have a theory.

First of all, I have to say that I've never understood the mystique of strip clubs. The first time I walked into one I could tell something was fundamentally wrong with the place. The experience was supposed to be sexy. But someone or something has sucked all the sexiness out of it, leaving just a few bored and forlorn naked girls grinding around a pole and a menagerie of creeps making rude comments. To me there's no such thing as sexiness without desire; there has to be heat, passion, and mutual lust, and it was obvious the strippers were only there for the money, and even the guys seemed to think it was a farce, at best a naughty diversion and at worst a way to hold power over the women onstage.

So Cody's romanticism of this, well––I have to say it––seedy environment struck me as odd. Giving stripping a shot, I understood. I did my fair share of outrageous things as a young man, sometimes just for the experience––but one has to be careful. Small risks can have big consequences. And just as casual drug use can lead to hard-drug use or even addiction, so does stripping often serve as an entry point for young women into the world of prostitution. And in fact, stripping today doesn't mean merely taking off your clothes—it means lap dancing: grinding your crotch against the crotch of a stranger until he comes—for money. So if there is a line between lap dancing and prostitution, it's so gray and so thin as to be nearly invisible. And that was just the beginning for Cody; she went deeper into this dangerous world than I ever thought she would, deluded into thinking it was okay because her boyfriend thought it was cool, and by the end you really got the feeling the adventure and fun were gone, and she was just another lost soul like so many of the strippers she felt sorry for at the beginning of her book.

Well, I guess we all know it had a happy ending. Cody burned out and got out before she got hurt or trapped. Fortunately she had many other talents. Such an ending has to make you glad. Because the one thing that keeps Candy Girl from being plain-old pornography (aside from the brilliant writing) is the openness and vulnerability of the author; you can't help liking her, and you really begin to worry about her and hope that she finds her way to a better life.

So back to my theory. I think that Cody got involved in stripping for the very same reasons that young men ride bulls at rodeos, play rugby, street race, or otherwise sow their wild oats. Candy Girl is a classic coming-of-age tale (excuse the pun), only told from a young woman's perspective—Cody's chance to be daring, outrageous, and seductive while she still can. After all, such opportunities fade soon enough as most of us settle into lives of middle-class respectability (or mediocrity). At least when she's 64, Cody can shock her grandkids with tales about stripping instead of boring them with the details of her graduation trip through Europe.

And now it seems she's better off than most of us. Good for her. I would like to think of Candy Girl as one of these crazy adventures one can take only when one is young, naïve, and resilient—a wild ride through the rapids of life, which for a time tossed Cody out of the raft, but by grit, creativity, and attitude, she pulled herself back in and kept on paddling. So I wish her the best of luck and a smoother ride down the river (if in fact that's what she wants), and, what's more, I look forward to hearing about it in her next book or movie.

Saturday, February 16, 2008

It's Oscar time! Grab your tux and slit your wrists!


This year's Oscars: there will be nothing but blood

To fully enjoy this year's Oscars, I went out and watched all five best-picture nominations. Now I regret it. I had plenty of warnings that this year's picks were both depressing and disturbing, but I ignored them all and naively trotted off to the theater. The experience not only soured me on the Oscars but also nearly changed me into an evangelical conservative.

Tonight I saw No Country for Old Men, by the Coen brothers, who grew up right here in St. Louis Park. In the past, the extreme violence in their films was always made tolerable by their bizarre humor and their twisted sense of irony, but without it, this movie is a black, mindless bloodfest on the order of Texas Chain Saw Massacre. It may be a long time, if ever, before I see another of their films.

Last week I saw There Will Be Blood, a gory, hopeless tale of a defective human being who destroys all the people around him. The grimness dragged on endlessly and with utter predictability. Scratch that one off your list too.

Atonement was a touch better, although just as depressing. Everybody in it ends up completely fucked. And the storyteller has deluded herself into thinking she's somehow atoned for ruining other people's lives by telling their love story that might have been. Not a ray of hope, only delusion and death to the bitter end.

Michael Clayton
, on the other hand, was a brilliantly written and acted story—my hands down, no-one-comes-close favorite, even though it too had darkness aplenty, and Juno was at least entertaining, although I'm not sure what makes it Oscar material—maybe just a lack of competition. Perhaps my enjoyment of it was heightened by my distaste for everything else I'd seen this year. I'd forgotten it was possible to go to a theater and laugh instead of come out looking for the razor blades. Maybe the ushers should just start handing them out as people leave so we can all dispatch ourselves in the parking lot. That does seem the intent of filmmakers these days.

While I'm at it, let me mention Sweeny Todd, not a best-picture contender, but Johnny Depp is up for Best Actor. When did we all decide that slitting throats was entertaining? Funny? Artistic? What amazes me is that we keep paying to get mugged at the theater. We never learn. Yes, it's well acted, beautifully filmed, blah, blah, blah, but that's like putting a turd in a fine silk jacket and oohing about the fabric.

I'm not sure where all the focus on blood, pain, and violence these days is getting us. Someone might argue that art is merely reflective of life and that film today is the canary in the coal mine telling us our air is poison, and there's more than a little truth to that, but it's equally true that life reflects art, and to immerse yourself in blood every time you go into the theater is perhaps to tolerate and expect it in your daily life. Hell—you might even come to enjoy it.

Me

Well that leaves me. This may be a bit more difficult; it's always harder being objective about oneself. My first impression is that I'm halfway between John and Howard, but as I reflect more, I think I have more in common with John than with Howard.

My upbringing in Fargo, North Dakota, was mostly worry free and fun. My father was a successful lawyer and later an executive, and we had a big white house, a swimming pool, and an embarrassment of belongings––a regular turnstile of new games, books, records, and clothes, nice cars, a motor home, a Triumph Spitfire (for the kids), and we ate steak, it seemed, every night.

My mother was a loving, creative, and intelligent woman who knew how to enjoy life. She held court in our neighborhood; not only all the kids but also their parents ended up in our house. My mother's friends, and later my high-school friends, would sit for hours in our kitchen laughing or baring their souls to her. My father was almost always working, and my mother, although death on feminism, did exactly what she wanted, which included sleeping until noon, spending freely, and living on coffee, cigarettes, and donuts.

The down side of my upbringing was the lack of discipline in our house. My two brothers and I spent most of our childhood running through the neighborhoods, watching TV, gobbling Snickers bars and guzzling sodas, and fighting with each other—both verbally and physically.

I nevertheless managed to stay out of trouble until I got to college. Neither my high school nor my family life had prepared me for the academic rigor I encountered there, and I was flabbergasted to learn that the average student spent 40 – 50 hours a week studying. I couldn't make the switch, and even though I had good grades in high school, now it was all I could do to keep my head above water. Feeling disconnected from both the academic and the social mix at the school (there really wasn't much of the latter), I found my home in the rugby club and threw myself into it heart and soul. By my junior year, I was captain on the field and head clown off, which meant I was drinking heavily, behaving badly, and visiting the dean's office on a regular basis trying to account for our team's outrageous behavior. There was something about the conservative, religious nature of the school that brought out the hellion in me, but of course my behavior was mostly hurting myself, and before long it put me in a downward spiral.

By winter of my junior year, I had worked myself into a deep depression. The pain of that experience surpassed anything I had ever known. I spent a month wandering around campus not knowing what was wrong with me. Late at night I walked over bridges and stared down at the ice, wondering if I would crash through it or merely bounce on the surface and break my bones, or how long it would take me to drown. Eventually I left school and was put on medications. It took me about a year to work my way back to normal, although in the process I had a semester-long relapse of near-insane behavior (think of Fight Club when Bard Pitt lets go of the steering wheel). Like John, I really didn't care whether I lived or died, and to this day, I'm not sure how I got through it all without killing myself or anyone else.

The positive side of the experience was that it forced me to rethink what was most important to me and what I wanted to do with my life. And I concluded that if life held such monsters lurking around its corners, a person would be a fool not to do the one thing he wanted most in life, and in my case, that was writing and telling stories.

Back at school my senior year I met Howard, who at the time was also planning to be a writer. Howard sparked in me a desire to learn where my professors had failed. He seemed to know everything, and he made it all interesting—ironic, entertaining, and relevant rather than sterile and pointless—and he freely interwove philosophy with science, history with art, and literature with psychology. More than anyone else I've known, I owe my lifelong interest in learning to Howard. That spring we both published stories in the school's literary magazine, and over the next summer I started my first novel.

The next ten years I spent writing three novels and working as a room-service waiter at L'hotel Sofitel in Minneapolis. I read everything I could get my hands on and even went back to school to get a master's degree in fiction writing (getting As this time), but in spite of all the hard work and single-minded focus, I couldn't publish a thing. In retrospect, I think I was trying to take on big, earth-shaking themes when didn't have the maturity to pull them off. I would have been much better off writing romances or fantasies, which at the time I thought were beneath me. And then just when I was finally pulling it all together, I gave it up.

I was thirty-two, married, and a new homeowner. Nancy and I wanted children, and I had worked my tail off for ten years with nothing to show for it, not even a resume to help me get a regular job. In the meantime all my buddies had become doctors, lawyers, teachers, or successful businessmen. I came to see the last decade of my life as a waste––the folly of a spoiled young man, and one day in a fit of disgust I burned everything I'd ever written.

That was my second painful transition in life, but it too worked out fine in the end. Eventually I got a job as a marketing-communications writer for a manufacturing company. I was surprised to find the work and the people interesting; it felt good to have a regular paycheck and lose the nagging bitterness of the artist manqué. Nancy and I raised two beautiful girls, and I found I loved being a father more than anything else I had done. I became a dedicated family man, performing my job and household duties to the utmost of my abilities. There isn't much more to tell about this decade of my life; as Tolstoy says, all happy families are alike, and the same is largely true, I think, for individuals.

Then in 1999, two years after I became a middle manager in a stress-ridden corporation, I decided the dual wage-earning model was a bad one for raising a family, so I left my corporate job and started a freelance writing business.

Being a freelancer allowed me to spend more time with my family, but it also had the unintended consequence of allowing me to write fiction once again. Before long I began to play around with the novel that eventually became The Islander, and as time went by, I devoted more and more hours to it each week. Six years later when I finally published it, my freelance business was suffering, and I was tired of the isolation and the never-ending quest for new clients, so I gave it up for another corporate job. But this time I'm not giving up on my own writing. I intend to keep at it, in whatever form possible, until the day I die, and so at 52 I find myself still working toward the same goal I dreamed about at 22 and hoping for that first big break on a novel.

So after writing down this personal history, I have to place my path in life closer to John's than to Howard's, but still somewhere between the two. The shape of the waves our three lives have cast is quite distinct: John's wave is vertical, with soaring peaks and plunging valleys; Howard's is more steady or undulating; and my own has included both peaks and valleys as well as the pleasant stability of Howard's. It's been an interesting run for all three of us, and when we met in Northfield last fall, we could have just as well been 21 again, sitting around in T-shirts, drinking beer, making confessions, and telling stories. For me anyway, life doesn't get any better than that. We all agreed to do it again next year, but this time we're going to ditch the corn dogs and relax full time, either going out to Howard's in Pennsylvania or hitting the streets of New York.

I can hardly wait.


Adventures in corn-dog land