Enjoy Me Among My Ruins

Juniper Fitzgerald

• Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781558613829
• eBook ISBN: 9781558613836
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Combining feminist theories, X-Files fandom, and memoir, Enjoy Me among My Ruins draws together a kaleidoscopic archive of Juniper Fitzgerald's experiences as a queer sex-working mother. Plumbing the major events that shaped her life, and interspersing her childhood letters written to cult icon Gillian Anderson, this experimental manifesto contends with dominant narratives placed upon marginalized people, ultimately rejecting a capitalist system that demands our purity and submission over our survival.

Diana . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Pretty and unshaven, Diana lives in a trailer park in one of the many dusty collectives tucked away in the desert. She makes art out of headless Barbie dolls and her partner gets tickled by men for money; he will later die of a heroin overdose.

We shotgun beers and smoke cigarettes. Diana hangs her lingerie on the fence, offering lonely passersby the opportunity to own what she’s worn.

She shits into paper bags and takes the bus to the Las Vegas Strip, paper bag in hand, where she meets anxious men. They cover themselves in her feces before attending weekend-long conferences on financial management and concrete.

Days after I give birth to my child, my partner’s artist friends write to congratulate him. One—a local artist— includes a quote about feminine mimesis in art and compares it to the masculine production of original work. Quite a claim from the mouth of a man who has never created another unique human inside his own body.

I think of Diana’s art, sometimes. I miss her headless Barbie dolls and dumpster-dived meals. I miss her real, original work, woven into the fabric of survival and necessity.

2006, 21 years old

Dear Gillian,

I sat with two wealthy guys from the South tonight. They do something with computers and outsourcing jobs. I sold one my underwear.

Apparently people bid for slots on Google. It’s not like the most reputable source pops up when you search for shit, oh no, it’s whichever company pays the most to come up. Fuckers.

Serenity and Jodie, sworn enemies. Verbal fights, etc., at the club. And then tonight Serenity introduced Jodie to some guys as her “best friend.” Crazy place.

Serenity is twenty-six with an eight-year-old daughter and she says she’s a strict, overprotective mom.

Jodie is twenty-nine with a boy and a girl. She speaks Spanish and has a strap-on. I told her I thought she was hot and she grabbed my cunt. I told her I was wet and she said she knew. She’s so drop-dead gorgeous. She’s the “type” of girl I’d see on the street and think, Okay, act feminine and talk about boys so she doesn’t think you’re a lesbian.

Joanie is uncomfortable when others joke about us being lesbians together.

Laura always tips me now. In the bathroom tonight, she called me her “girl” and her “sexy bitch.” We exchanged I love yous and I thought I could actually, really fall in love with her.

Serenity said that since she started stripping, she’s become into women. “Guys are pervs. I go home to my boyfriend and it’s like, ‘Don’t touch me.’ Oh yeah, we’ve had way less sex since I started here.”

Serenity is so interested in what I study and the papers I write.

“So, you study sociopaths?” her boyfriend asked me.

“Ha, yeah …” I said. “YOU.”

Serenity works as a bill collector during the day.

My bucktoothed regular came in tonight. While dancing for him, I looked in his eyes and had a moment of sad thoughts. I thought how painful it is for all of us to be alive. This regular has always seemed nerdy to me, but not tonight. Tonight, he talked about his father dying, his friends that got shot last week, his addiction to painkillers, and his rocky relationship with his mother. He hates his job at Walmart. When I first met him, he was in a suit and had just taken his mother out for dinner. I thought that he was a sheltered mama’s boy then.

Todd came in. I told him, like I always do, that he’s an asshole.

When I was onstage, I heard one of the dancers at the table next to me: “Yeah, but she’s really nice.”

I suddenly wondered if I was, like, an embarrassingly bad dancer or something.

Pap came back, again. Abnormal, again.

Dennis was in. I explained why I never answer his phone calls. As always, he grabbed at my cunt. Said he thought he scared the new girl by trying to stick his fingers in her pussy. He and his friends called me “naughty” and undid my top. I laughed and gave them exceptionally hot lap dances to tease and regain power.

I took my panties off and put them in Dennis’s pocket after a hot conversation about sexual fantasies—his was of his employees and dominating them, mine of my boss at the coffee shop dominating me.

He said he was going to make his wife smell my panties and jerk off. I told him I wanted him to wear them.

5. The Tulip

A kind of thoughtful Hegelian synthesis linking up two dead women.

—Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Every love story is a ghost story. And mine begins with tulips.

There are billows of blue fabric, compressed and released in a liquescent illusion. The fabric brushes the rafters of the old place—built by the hands of a man who will later be my lover—and returns to Earth with draft-loving cobwebs.

I am a Dead Woman in the play The Tulip; I recite my lines, which are mostly Dutch poetry. I later whisper these lines into the ears of Las Vegas strip-club clients, convincing them that I am an “exotic” European transplant. I drunkenly shilly-shally from Dutch language to British and Irish accents, a kind of hilarious drag performance that could only ever seem natural in the spaces of sex work.

I move too slowly in The Tulip to be detected by the naked eye, so once I’ve reached the other side of the stage, the audience member thinks to herself, Has she always been there?

There is also a Little Girl in the play. The actress who plays her is all grown up now, a big star in New York.

In the play, the Little Girl dies by drowning. I am tasked with preparing her for the underworld with the help of two other Dead Women. The ocean is unaffected by other actors’ pleas; it was the Girl’s fate to meet a blue, watery death.

We all say obscure things that the Playwright writes for us. Things about seeds and vegetables and butt plugs.

We say, “Chop wood, carry water. We built a world, that world ended, and we helped to dissipate the rest. The stage is empty, the props are gone, the lights are out, and the actors have left.” We break the fourth wall in this play about a war over flowers. Poetic histrionics: I don’t even think the war ever really happened.

It prickles your skin, if you’re open to the wildness of it all.

“These characters hold the power of prophetic ghosts,” the local newspaper says of the play, “evoking the past while at the same time bracing with the possibilities that lie ahead.”

— . —

Mustard-colored rays of sunlight drape the desert in a kind of slow-moving chrome the year the Joshua trees blossom with tufts of white petals.

And I am pregnant—an unexpected thing, which I learn of under a burning August sun. The soles of the Playwright’s sandals—he is now my lover—melt on the Las Vegas terrain when he shuffles all hunched over like the weight of the world is only tolerable if you don’t look at it.

I love this about the Playwright—his slow movements and dark hair. I think to myself, No one has ever kissed me in public before.

Enfolded in the waters of my womb, my baby shares a dream with me—infinite gradations of blue, the color that novelist Ronald Sukenick says is the color of time. The color with which Maggie Nelson is in love: Blue is something of an ecstatic accident produced by void and fire, she writes in Bluets.

But when my baby is born, she isn’t crying. She isn’t crying because she isn’t breathing. She has nearly drowned in the ocean of my body.

My dead grandmother is there in the room; she is the only thing that I can see. That, and stark ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Enjoy Me among My Ruins
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• A Note
• Epigraph
• Jean
• Cassandra
• Grandma
• Theresa
• Diana
• Jennifer
• Marita
• Anita
• Dakota
• Andi
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Also Available from the Feminist Press
• About the Feminist Press