Flashdance and
the Leg Warmer Blues
AS SOON AS MY HANGOVER FADED, so did my resolve to never drink again. In fact, the nausea and shame were hip-checked out of the way by a burning desire to try again. I’d loved the feeling of being confident and unselfconscious, even for a few minutes. It was as though alcohol gave me the break from myself that I’d been craving. For years I’d felt as though I was allergic to myself: alcohol was my EpiPen. Now all I needed was to learn how to drink properly. Luckily, drinking was a core activity among my new friends. We stole booze from our parents and mixed it together in Mason jars to create noxious but powerful potions that we drank out in the woods. Then we would stagger around and sometimes throw up. And after each episode, I’d find myself sick to death and humiliated, even if I hadn’t done any singing or dancing or even much talking, which always got me into trouble. I suffered remorse of the damned every time I drank but it lasted only as long as the hangover.
In some cultures adolescents come of age in well-established ceremonies. They take sojourns in the wilderness or undergo purification rituals involving corporal punishment. In my town, as in many Western societies, one prime coming-of-age ritual was to host a drinking party. Soon after I became a card-carrying member of the party nation, my friends and I decided we were ready to graduate from staggering around in the bush by ourselves to staggering around with other people in a house. Being precocious in all things related to partying, my wild friend Darcy decided she wanted to have a party at her house. She had an older brother, which meant we had ready access to alcohol. We were set.
She invited us over to her place on a Friday night when she knew her parents would be out. It was to be my first real party, meaning one with older boys, drugs, and booze, and I was entirely, one hundred percent stoked. The fact that it was going to be held at the home of my new friend made me feel that great things were possible and even likely.
At this point, I wasn’t completely sure what would constitute a great thing. A lot of beer was a great thing and so was weed. The possibility of getting a boyfriend was perhaps the greatest thing of all. The minute I picked up my first drink I jettisoned childish dreams of becoming a doctor or an astronaut or even a Zamboni driver. Instead I aspired to be like some of the tough older girls I saw who dated men who drove trucks or to be like the lead character in Flashdance. The movie had recently hit the theatres and, like almost every other girl (and quite a few guys) who saw it, I became obsessed with dancing like Jennifer Beals (or to be strictly accurate, Beals’s stand-in). Not that I practised dancing or anything. I wanted to wake up one day and discover that extreme dance ability had descended on me from above. The idea of being the hot, misunderstood quasi-stripper who was also a welder was exciting. Somewhere along the line I decided that what a person needed to dance like Jennifer Beals was leg warmers. I surmised that nice warm calves were what enabled her to perform the essential moves, including peeling off the (in my case unnecessary) bra without removing the off-the-shoulder sweatshirt, and pulling a chain to unleash the torrent of water onto one’s head while seated in the middle of an empty but nicely lit stage.
When I heard about the party, I was nervous, as always when faced with a social situation. I knew that I could get loaded at the party and that would take care of my nerves. But what about the four or five days between the announcement and the party itself? I decided a new article of clothing would get me through the rough patch. So I went to the local jeans store and was thrilled to find they’d begun to carry leg warmers. I was in such a hurry to get a pair that I didn’t even wait for Darcy to steal them and instead paid full price.
They were light grey, machine-knitted, acrylic tubes, and when I put them on over my jeans they made my lower legs look like those of a juvenile elephant with water retention issues. They also made me feel capable of breaking into an extremely demanding dance routine at a moment’s notice, though not while I was sober, obviously. Dancing, even with leg warmers, was best left until after I’d had a few drinks and was ready for my inner flashdancer to emerge.
After an hour and a half of intense curling iron work to get my hair to feather so that it met at the back like two buttocks coming together, and elaborate full-coverage application of black eyeliner and blusher and concealer, I was ready to face my public at the house party. Maybe that motocross guy who looked like Danno would be there!
Off I went, down the lake road toward Darcy’s house in all my leg-warmed glory. It was not quite five o’clock in the afternoon. We were too young to party at a more fashionable hour. My mother wasn’t home from work yet, so she wasn’t there to stop me or ask any inconvenient questions about where I was going.
I was the first guest to arrive. Darcy and I sat on her front steps, the ones her father had built out of plywood and pushed up against the trailer to serve as a porch. We smoked Player’s Light cigarettes and shared a Mason jar full of Sambuca, Malibu, Crown Royal, gin, and vermouth. It knocked me into a stuttering blackout almost immediately. At some point, we were joined by many of the other middle school wild ones. It was still light outside. I was pleased to see that I was the only one wearing leg warmers. We turned on the record player and danced. And when we finished, it seemed that the trailer had magically filled up with boys. High school boys. Darcy’s brother’s friends. They were dressed in lumber jackets and smelled like pot and they carried cases of beer.
By this time, my confidence had kicked in. It wasn’t just the alcohol and the weed. The leg warmers had done something to my sense of personal importance. In addition to bestowing upon me the power of dance, those leg warmers seemed to have given me the longed-for gift of gymnastics! When I wasn’t dreaming about having an older boyfriend and being a terrific dancer, I had fantasies in which I was an immensely talented gymnast who could perform death-defying tumble routines. This in spite of the fact that, even as a toddler, I had never been able to touch my toes.
I swanned around the party, feeling Beals-erized and lithe. Cutting-edge and limber. In truth, I was hammered beyond all hope of redemption.
It didn’t take me long to figure out that someone besides me was admiring my action. He was, I thought, the best looking of the older guys at the party, stocky, with a handsome, lightly freckled face. His teeth were straight. At that time my teeth were trussed up like unruly mental patients in order to cure my overbite, so I always took note when people had nice teeth.
My recollection of our conversation is fuzzy. I think it went something like this:
Him: Hey. Nice leg warmers.
Me: Thanks.
Him: Want a beer?
Me: Yes.
A pause as he watched me guzzle the beer in a very welder-ish fashion.
Him: Hey, why don’t you come with me for a minute?
Me and my leg warmers followed the handsome older boy to my friend’s bedroom.
Considering that I was already a committed drinker and had been for a few months, I was also still kind of naïve. I knew that it probably wasn’t an excellent idea to disappear into a room with a boy I’d only just met. I assumed he would try to kiss me and that would be a good thing. Because then he’d be my boyfriend and I would be the first leg-warmer wearer in grade seven who was dating a high school man.
Sweet!
So I happily kissed him on my friend’s small, unmade bed. But then he did something strange. He pushed me off the bed in front of him. I thought maybe he’d dropped something and needed me to help him find it. I was glad I had my leg warmers on, but also a little worried that they might get dirty. My friend’s room was a sty. There were clothes and tapes and stuff all over the floor.
Then he stood in front of me and pulled down his pants.
I gaped at him in astonishment.
This was even worse than Henry Miller had led me to believe! In my drunken state, I struggled to think through my options. I didn’t want to be rude or embarrass him by saying no, even though what he seemed to be proposing was very, very low on my list of things I wanted to do. Probably just a few spots below “Cut off finger with rusty axe” and “Fall down and break arm in three places so the bone protrudes through the skin.” I tried to gather my thoughts. My stomach, however, couldn’t wait for me to come up with excuses.
The lethal mixture of booze and dope, dancing and smoking and unexpected pantslessness was too much and before I could warn him, I’d thrown up all over his footwear and legs. Like a threatened squid, my body had released the perfect defensive diversion.
“Oh man!” he said. “Are you puking?”
“No,” I said, staring at the vomit dripping down his front.
“Fuck,” he said, staring down at himself with his hands in the air. “Gross!”
And that’s pretty much all I remember from my first house party and what was, technically speaking, my first date. I woke up the next day, sick with remorse and shame and the realization that quitting drinking wasn’t just a good idea, it was a complete and total necessity. I wasn’t the only one who had an early drinking experience like that. In fact, my experience was relatively mild. I kept hearing about girls going to parties, getting drunk, passing out, and waking up to find strange boys having sex with them. People whispered about these events and the people involved. The blame floated around, waiting to be assigned.
That evening was also the first in a series of notable vomiting incidents, something for which I became quite famous, especially after a projectile puking episode that occurred at my first concert (Trooper at the Civic Centre). In that case I nearly hit the band from one of the top bleachers. But I digress.
The party also marked the beginning of a shift in my relations with the wild ones. The next Monday at school Darcy walked up to where I was standing with some other girls who’d been at the party.
“Did someone get sick in my room?” she asked, staring at me.
“Uh, no,” I said. I was pretty sure most of the barf ended up on the guy rather than the carpet or bed, so that was a little bit true.
“My parents smelled it,” she said. “And now I’m in trouble.”
“Oh,” I said.
“I hate liars,” she continued, still staring at me. The other girls nodded in agreement. “And sluts,” she added.
When they walked away, I was left with a feeling that my life was spinning out of control. The blame for this one was landing square on me. I realized that none of it would have happened if I hadn’t been drunk. The only solution was to quit drinking for real this time. Or at least work harder at learning to drink properly.