Category: Essays

The lesbians surround me. Swarms of them come in every day through the heavy glass door and want to pick at my brain.

“Are there any transgender books for children?

“I want to introduce my sister to feminism, but she doesn’t like to read. Is there a novel or something that would be good to give her?”

“I’m doing a research paper on [enter obscure lesbian activist’s name here]. Do you have any biographies on her?”

I work at a feminist bookstore and am surrounded by books and feminists and lesbians all day. I love this. I receive books. I gaze at the short-fauhawks. I shelve books. I smile at the cute lesbians in the plaid shorts. I read books when my bosses aren’t around. I offer recommendations to the baby dykes eyeing the erotica section. I take home all of the damaged copies. I play Ani Difranco on the sound system for the customer’s pleasure. I have a plethora of knowledge about every damn lesbian and feminist text out there. I get phone numbers.

Working at a feminist bookstore is one of the most amazing, relaxing, fun and entertaining jobs I have ever had. Most of our customers are incredibly nice and excited to be surrounded by so many books written by women and other minorities.

Occasionally, though, there is that one customer.

A man wearing sweat pants and a muscle t-shirt came into the store a month ago and asked where the “sexy books” were. We pointed him in the direction of the erotica section. Not much later a co-worker found him doing push-ups in the back of the store. Weird. He came in the next day and tried to do the same thing, and we told him no. We told him leave. He started at as, looked pleadingly past our heads to the erotica section, flexed his muscles then finally turned around and left.

And there’s always gotta be that dude who tries to be all funny and comes in and says “Are men allowed in here?” I reply by telling him, “Of course. We’re not sexist here.”

Most guys who come into the feminist bookstore are pretty cool, respectful, and excited to see books they can’t find at the big corporate chain bookstores. But we don’t see them as much as we see the lesbians come in, which is often. And we always love the lesbian shoppers. Love when they show their pride by buying queer books, when they hold their girlfriend’s hand in public, when you can see that unavoidable smile on their face because they know they are surrounded by their kind, by a place that supports them.

Aside from creepy dudes and wonderful lesbians, mothers and their kids also come into the store to look at our huge selection of non-stereotypically-gendered children’s books.

Kids learn things here.

For instance:

On the front counter where people line up to buy their books, there is a display of stickers that say “I Heart My Cunt”, or “I Heart My Yoni”, and “I Heart My Pussy” and the like.

Scene:

Mother and son come up to the counter. Mother is in her mid-thirties, and son is about seven or so. I’m standing behind the counter with my boss, and the little boy sees the stickers.

“I Love My Pussy.” He reads aloud.

“Yes,” my boss says quickly, turning red and putting the sticker display underneath the counter, “We love pussies. Meow meow.”

Nice save.

This is not the same boss who told me the story about what happened when author Marjane Satrapi read at the store. She’s a graphic novelist, the author of Persepolis, and is a very admired author in not only the feminist community, but the literary community as well. The story goes: she comes into the store and is giving a reading, and in the middle of her reading she pulls out a cigarette and lights it up in the store.

“What did you do?” I ask my boss when she tells me this story, knowing it is an obvious rule that you can’t smoke in the store.

“She’s fucking Marjane Satrapi! I got her an ashtray.”

My only aspiration in life is to have someone respond to me in that way.

There have been many other famous authors who have read at the store. Isabel Allende, Barbara Kingsolver, Eve Ensler, Jhumpa Lahiri, and even Hillary Clinton. But the most fantastic event I ever attended was a reading by Cathy Wilkerson (a member of The Weather Underground, a notorious activist group in the 1960s that tried to make political statements by bombing empty targeted political buildings). Among the people in her audience was a man sitting in the front row wearing nothing but an American flag wrapped around his body, and then there was also an old wiry man in the last row of chairs who stood up during the Q&A section and shouted “You’re a terrorist!” When I escorted him to the door, he said that I wasn’t fooling him, that he knew me and this store were spies for the FBI. We even got a letter from him a few weeks later that detailed out the points as to why he knew we were spies. What’s funny is that my grandfather actually was a spy for the FBI, though I have never been one.

Other than the famous authors, we also host events for first-time authors. They set up a reading event, then come in with their self-published books and their bottle of wine to celebrate their first reading event, ever, and no one shows up to listen. The correct response from a staff members in this situation is, “It’s not the first time this has happened, and it won’t be the last,” which is actually true. And then the author gives you a nice smile that says thank you, and then she says “Well. Let’s open up that bottle of wine!” And we employees stand around smiling because we are at work and getting paid to be drunk, and the author smiles with us because she’s trying to squash her devastation.

Finally, there is a monthly lesbian event that has been going on for years. It’s an event on the third Saturday of every months for “lesbians and their friends.” It occurs after store hours, so as not to be disrupted by shoppers. For this event there are performers other than authors on the stage. Musicians, belly dancers, filmmakers, and even burlesque dancers. And one time there was a lesbian tent revival. Last winter the theme of the event for January was an open-mic of sorts, where people who signed up could go on stage and perform, dance, sing, read and maybe win some money. Judges judged and audience members clapped. Three of my coworkers each performed an act, so I agreed to do one, as well. I do not know why I did this, because I am horrible at dancing and have the worst self-esteem about my body, ever, but I decided to do a burlesque act. All pasties and garter belt and fishnet stockings. I did a sexy dance to an acoustic version of Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face.” I glued cards to my body and ripped them off. I wore outrageous earrings and red stiletto heals. And at the end of the song I was wearing nothing but pasties on my nipples, and a pair of black underwear. I gave myself the stage name of Betty Bangover, because I think “bangover” is the best word in the English language (get it—it’s like a hangover from having too much sex the night before). And I chose Betty because that is my grandmother’s name, and I thought it would be hilarious to name my mostly-naked personae after her.

To re-cap:

This is what it is like to work at a feminist bookstore: you are surrounded by rad queer people all day, you have the occasional encounter with creepy and/or crazy and paranoid men, you negotiate how to be in a space in which there are both children and sex things, you meet famous authors whom you admire, and you drink free booze with disappointed newbie authors. And, what the hell—why not get naked at your workplace? Because it is something you can do. Because no one in the store finds it odd. Because everyone here is supportive of feminist and creative endeavors, and they all clap exuberantly when the person who usually rings them up and bags their books for them is in the store and getting naked.

 

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Chelsey Clammer received her MA in Women’s Studies from Loyola University Chicago. She has been published in THIS, The Rumpus, Atticus Review, Sleet, The Coachella Review and Make/shift among many others. She received the Nonfiction Editor’s Pick Award 2012 from both Revolution House and Cobalt, as well as a Pushcart Prize nomination. Clammer is a weekly columnist for The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, as well as the assistant nonfiction editor for both Eckleburg and The Dying Goose. She is currently finishing up a collection of essays about finding the concept of home in the body, as well as a memoir about sexuality and mental illness. You can read more of her writing at: www.chelseyclammer.com.

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When I was eight, I saw my mother win a hula-hoop competition. We were at a work picnic for my dad’s company, and she entered the contest and won it. Her prize was a bright yellow walkman. Yes, that portable thing from the 90’s that played tapes.

I wasn’t too surprised when I saw her win, when I saw that she could keep the pink hula-hoop circling her hips for a longer amount of time than any of the other contestants. It wasn’t surprising because I knew how strong my mother’s abdomen was, knew of her never-ending amount endurance.

These physical traits of my mother existed because she taught Jazzercise—“Jazzy” as I called it in my diary when I was nine and jotted down that I was finally a popular girl in my forth grade class, because my mom came to my school and taught all of us Jazzy and everyone thought it was cool, so I was automatically cool because I was the instructor’s daughter. Being a Jazzercise instructor for fifteen years did not just mean that my mother had the perfect physicality to win a hula-hooping contest, but this also meant that she had a large collection of brightly colored spandex shorts and thong leotards. And it meant that she had boxes full of singles—tapes with only one song on them. And this fact meant that she had to switch tapes during the hour long class after each three minute song. She put the tapes in order inside of a small wooden crate, then set the crate down on top of the boombox in whatever rec center or church basement she was teaching in that day. And finally, the fact that my mother taught Jazzercise for fifteen years also meant that she owned a microphone headset like Madonna—not Madonna our dog who my mother insisted on naming Madonna because she thought the dog had sass like the pop singer Madonna, but her microphone headset looked like the one the pop singer Madonna wore.

Sometimes I tagged along with my mom to her classes and babysat the mothers’ kids. The following statement is not a generalization, but a fact: all of the attendees of my mother’s Jazzercise classes were young mothers trying to sweat of the weight they gained from giving birth. So I babysat all of the student’s kids as their mothers tried to do away with what having these kids had done to their bodies. There was one exception to this generalization, which was Glen who was in his forties, who had long gray hair he kept out of his face with an orange sweatband that matched the color of his orange slouch socks. He, too, wore spandex tights—royal blue ones that always turned a wet, darker shade of blue near his crotch when he started sweating—but unlike the determined mothers, he wore a baggy white t-shirt instead of a thong leotard. Thank god. Glen had two small kids and was also a long-distance runner. When I ran my first marathon at age seventeen, I passed Glen who was also running the marathon, only he was also trotting along while pushing a stroller that contained his two young children. I noticed how he bounced as he ran, and a year later when I finally convinced my mother to go running with me, I noticed she also had this hop quality in her stride. Too much of her body movement had been saturated with bouncy Jazzercise moves, which made her incapable of running without a bounce.

Sometimes when I tagged along with my mom to her classes, I would actually participate in the class. But I could never get the hang of all of those moves—plie, grapevine, chasse, kick ball change, Jazz square—and so by the middle of the class I digressed to hopping up and down and kicking out my feet and waving my arms and flinging my body around as I tried to keep somewhat in sync with my mother’s expert rhythmic movements on the stage.

My mom taught Jazzercise four times a week—three weeknight classes and one “power class” on Saturday mornings. Those classes were “powerful” because they lasted for ninety minutes instead of the normal hour, and because the plastic purple aerobic steps were put to use during them.

I remember how at the end of every class my mom would stretch one hand up over her head, and then exhale a full, relaxing breath that wooshed through the room due to the amplification made by the Madonna microphone. She practiced this finale move in the extra room in our house that was designated as her Jazzercise office. This room had two huge mirrors on the wall, a dark cherry desk on which her double-deck boombox sat, a day bed that was only used for if we had company and we never had company, a green and purple plastic aerobic step, a small TV with a VHS player that sat on top of the dresser that contained my mother’s spandex shorts and thong leotards, and also in this room was a closet full of Jazzercise instructional VHS tapes and single cassettes. Each morning she went into her office and started to learn the routines—which changed every month.

The boxes which contained the new set of routines for the month were delivered by a UPS truck a week before the beginning of the following month. Inside were all of the singles of music used for the new set, the instructional VHS tape, and a printed out set of movement instructions for each song. Being an instructor meant that my mom owned a franchise, which meant that she had to pay the Jazzercise creator/guru Judi Sheppard Missett a small fee each month in order to receive the tapes and instructions and to be able to continue teaching.

It was always exciting the day that Jazzercise box came. Which new music would be inside? Would there be anything I would actually want to listen to? Most of the time it was not, yet I was still excited by the possibility of cool music. Back then—and I imagine still now—Jazzercise created routines to the most annoying of songs. “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.” And when the “Flinstones” movie came out staring John Goodman as Fred, Judi Sheppard Missett made up a routine to the movie’s theme song sung by the B-52’s. I hated the B-52’s. A single note from “Love Shack” would put the entire song playing on an endless loop inside of my head for two weeks. The Jazzercise songs were never good, were never songs I would want to listen to, but they were necessarily peppy so you could Jazzercise to them.

My mother had a set of highlighters she used in order to mark important instructions printed on the instructor’s guide, to make them stand out. Orange for a change in pace. Blue for beat counts. Yellow for the names of the moves. And green for the verbal instructions she was to say to her class. Each month my mother meticulously marked up the instructions with her highlighters then began learning the routines, starting out with sitting on the ground with her back against the day bed watching the hour-long video so she could get a feel for what this new rotation of songs was like.

And then it was time to practice. First she would go along with the tape while reading the instructions. The she would turn of the VHS and play each song on her boombox while she practiced the routine to it, trying to not look at her notes. Eventually she practiced them with no notes, and once that was accomplished, she would then start going through the whole set multiple times a day in order to memorize it.

While she was learning the newest set, my mom was still teaching her four classes a week. All of this is to say that for fifteen years my mother was doing Jazzercise for at least forty hours a week. Her job was to help slim down her students’ bodies, and the first step toward that goal was to set an example, to bravely dance around a stage wearing a neon yellow thong leotard and fuchsia spandex shorts. She did this to show her students that if they worked at it hard enough, they, too, could have a body that did not look hideous in a thong leotard. But more importantly she wanted to give them confidence in themselves.

My mother eventually quite Jazzy. I was in college by then and hadn’t been able to attend one of her classes in years. I think she just get bored with it, sick of it, tired of it, and so she didn’t care that much anymore about being excellent on the stage. Years after she quits she’s out shopping one day and finds a silver necklace with a charm of a woman dangling from it. The woman has one arm raised, grasping up to a yellow gem shaped like a star. The charm looked like how she used to look at the end of every class. Arm stretched up. Exhaling a big, calming breath, and feeling the pride of teaching another perfect class vibrate through her body.

She bought the charm to remember those times. To never forget about the thongs and the spandex and Glen with his gray hair and the Madonna microphone and her boxes of tapes and especially to not forget about the way her audience looked at her amazed.

 

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Chelsey Clammer received her MA in Women’s Studies from Loyola University Chicago. She has been published in THIS, The Rumpus, Atticus Review, Sleet, The Coachella Review and Make/shift among many others. She received the Nonfiction Editor’s Pick Award 2012 from both Revolution House and Cobalt, as well as a Pushcart Prize nomination. She is currently finishing up a collection of essays about finding the concept of home in the body. You can read more of her writing at: www.chelseyclammer.com.

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