Astrid Begins

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Astrid started out as a raspberry bobbed wig, a set of false eye-lashes and a pair of one-inch, louis-heeled mules.
She started out, in fact, as the uniform - name included - that I put on three afternoons a week (Tuesdays, Thursday and Fridays) to pay my way through college.

Same old story, right? Every girl who ever worked as a peep show dancer or a massage-parlour whore is really in Women's Studies and comes from a middle-class background.

Well, not quite.

It's not like my mother didn't read everything she could get her cereal-factory-worker hands on. It's not like growing up in Tempsford, with your grandparents living down the block, means you're dumb, inbread, or poor.

Well, okay, it does generally mean that you're poor.

So, like every other working-class kid who wasn't going to take over the farm/store/business, I worked my ass off in high school, trying to be as Well Rounded (in-so-far as you can be a rhodes schollar while working at the 7-11 every day) as possible while getting the 85%-or-higher average that would score me a scholarship and a ticket out of Tempsford.

And I got one. Moved to Ottawa, lived on Campus, hung out at the GLBTQ center, cut classes to poster for cheep rates at rock shows, protest tuition hikes, and recover from late night parties. Cruised at the Lookout, Ladyfest, Breathless, and Campus Pride.

Scraped through my first year with a seventy-three.

Shit.

Mom was furious (big surprise), hollering over the phone about me blowing my chance at something more than shift-work and feeling forty by the time I turned twenty-four.
She wanted to know when I was coming home.

I said I wasn't.

"Didn't I teach you any sense??" was her voice over the way-more-than-three-cents-a-minute long-distance line, demanding to know why I wouldn't shell out the $125 round trip bus-fare if it meant free food and rent for four months.

There were better-paying jobs in the city, I reasoned, telling her that I could crash on someone's couch for the summer and then get room-mates for September. Reminding her that she taught me how to stretch a penny til it just about broke. Promising I'd be fine.

Not mentioning the small matter of my SM/poly/dykish leanings, the reality of my current unemployment, or the fact that the couch (by which I mean futon, by which I mean bed) I'd be crashing on belonged to my girlfriend, Samantha.

"I gotta go," I tell her, finally, after listening to her list of the ways I'm screwing up my life. "I'll be fine. I promise."

When I hang up, I chew on my nails. My dorm-room is already packed - one shelf of saleable text books left to unload at the bookstore (which is fast, if not lucrative), and I'll be ready to leave.

Now all I have to do is get myself a job.