I don’t know about little boys, hell, it becomes more and more apparent each day that I don’t know much about grown mens either, but I do know about little girls and how we’re raised. No matter what kind of home you came from you were served fairytales. There’ve been a million essays, books & magazine articles written about it and I’m not here to reinvent the wheel. I’m here to talk about my fairytale, the fantasy that shaped my dating life.
Everyone knows the core basics.
Cinderella finds a prince with a foot fetish
Sleeping Beauty is saved from a lifetime of dwarves by a somophiliac prince
Snow White is saved by a necrophiliac
Hansel & Gretel are abandoned by their parents
The Ugly Ducking is too wierd for friends or love
Disney makes a fortune telling those stories slightly differently. While any one of them is bad enough, none of them were mine.
I roll to Beauty & the Beast. I’m spending a lot of painful Thursday mornings trying to change that sentence from present to past tense.
In a nutshell, Beauty tries to save her father (and there we are, right back on the Thursday morning couch) by agreeing to be the Beast’s hostage. He’s the biggest scariest monster in town. He’s the show, for sure, for sure, but her Love turns him back into the prince he really was. She gets castles, riches, a handsome prince hubby, saves her dad & lives happily ever after.
Beauty & the Beast ruined me. Okay, it wasn’t the only childhood trauma for sure, but I fell for it hook, line & stinker.
You do not have the time at this moment to go through the list of Beasts I’ve tried to tame, always, always, always believing that my love, my LOVE, will release them from the evil spell (crack, violence, criminal enterprises, homelessness, booze, plain ol’ meaness & stupidity…and the beat goes on) and free the prince inside them, and I will be rewarded in the end with riches and love. Some call this Magical Thinking. I call it not thinking at all.
- George lived in a park near my parent’s house. We met the day he got out of jail for vagrancy and going to “his place” invariably meant a stranger’s backyard or a cluster of bushes in the park.
- BW was wearing a pink, brown & white three piece plaid bell bottom suit when we met the day he came home from prison for I don’t know what. A true romantic, the next time he came home he rented an apartment across the street from mine, and another uptown. For his wife.
- Red Wolf lived in park as well, this one near my first apartment. While I worked unawares, he walked the streets preaching that he was the 2nd coming of Christ & was here to save the East Village. He wore a red monks robe, no shoes, a black beret and a patch over one eye – although he had two perfectly good eyes. And a sweet smile.
- Smitty found me at a biker funeral I’d crashed hoping to meet someone nice. I’ve saved stacks of “love” letters from the 15 years we were together on and off. All with various federal penitentiary return addresses.
- Slade swept me off my feet the day he was released from prison after a twenty year bid for a crime he committed when he was 18 years old. I thought he was my crowning achievement. He bought a 4 bedroom house for me and our “kids” and I ran as fast as I could in the other direction.
- Crazy Jimmy carried a scrap book full of newspaper clippings of his criminal escapades. His brand of cocaine fueled crazy will get a post of it’s own on the dirtygirl diaries– stay tuned.
There were more, but you get the point. Beauty & the Beast Fucked. Me. Up. I didn’t find my savior, my prince, because, really the nice princes are inside their nice castles with the nice not quite so crazy girls – not sleeping in parks and prisons. Most of the time, when you look inside a Beast, you find an angry frightened kid who is none too pleased at being dragged out of his warm soft hiding place and into the light. Most of the time when you rope yourself a Beast, like any wild animal that’s trapped, given the chance, he will either rip out your throat & leave you bleeding by the side of the road, or swallow you whole. But, if you’re very lucky, you still believe in magic and are game for a slightly different fairytale, the woodcutter (Carpenters Local Union #608) will cut the Beast’s belly open, rescue you and at the very least you’ll end up with a guy with a trade and a union job – which is not a bad way to end a fairytale.
