What Would Beyoncé Do?! Page 10

  I did the gig, 15 minutes, and I smashed it, they loved me and I had a ball. I felt like I had made the right choice. I walked back to sleep in my new American mum’s weird bed, got honked at for looking at the wrong side of the street when crossing, and I felt good, scared, petrified and good. Klaus texted me to ask me how I was. I was strong, I didn’t reply.

  I started the classes and I loved it! I met a woman called Susan Messing who is a comedy genius and improviser legend; she totally took me under her wing. I was totally in awe of Susan, she is inspiring to watch and just so ridiculously talented. The classes were brilliant, I was so happy. For the first time in about three years I was feeling excited because I was doing something for myself. I was in improvisation classes and I was dying on my ass. Every time I would nail something, I would fuck up again, and I loved it. I loved feeling like Play-Doh, like I was getting mashed and beaten and moulded into something beautiful only to be mashed up again. I loved every second. It was watering my soul.

  I started growing in confidence. At the time, I had really long hair, I had hair down to my waist, and on a whim I went to the hairdresser’s and thought, I know what will show ’em! I will cut it all off! So I had it hacked into a bob. I felt like Samson. I cried for days, it was my biggest regret. Someone posted a picture online and Klaus emailed saying, oh my God, you look beautiful. I cried harder and sobbed into the mirror, imagining shouting at him: ‘Look what you made me do!’

  The worst part about cutting long hair off is when you wash it for the first time and you are like whhaaaat, I don’t need so much shampoo any more?!! And then you cry again. I mean, I know in the grand scheme of things it’s not that significant, but for a first-world problem it’s pretty traumatic. I forced myself to leave the house and make the most of my time.

  I was about six weeks in now and was starting to tire of the loneliness. Just having no one else to go ‘Isn’t this soo weird’ with. Little things, like when I ordered lemonade at the bar and they gave me this weird lemon drink, aka real lemonade as opposed to Sprite. And then I would say, ‘Oh no, that’s not what I wanted, I wanted lemonade lemonade, like, you know, Sprite.’ And they would be like ‘Oh well then in that case you should have said Sprite.’ Or when I tried to buy a ticket for the train but didn’t have cash and so asked one of the station staff if I could pay by card.

  ‘Waaaa??’

  ‘Can I pay by card for a ticket?’

  ‘Noooo.’

  ‘Oh OK, where can I get cash from?’

  ‘Da bank.’

  Helpful, really helpful. (God bless London TFL staff. They are the best and underrated and so fucking educated on everything around their station, you don’t appreciate them until you try and buy a train ticket in America.)

  I was fine when I was in my Chicago classes but the novelty of being on my own so often was starting to wear off. I enjoyed the gigs and people were lovely to me but I hadn’t made any long-term friends yet. I was desperate to speak to Klaus. He emailed me a few times and I tried to ignore him and focus on my adventure, but at the same time, why would I want to ignore the very person I was missing and pining over? Talking to him made me feel better, even though he still didn’t want to date me.

  I would go to the cinema by myself and imagine he was with me. I went to see that film 127 Hours and the whole time thought Klaus was like my arm that I needed to cut off in order to survive. (Oh hello spoiler alert!)

  I caved in and called him. We were both delighted to speak to each other and talked for hours, romanticising our pain with stupid movie analogies. How could it not work when we were both hurting by not being in each other’s lives? My friends were right: going away did seem to change things. We didn’t talk about all the reasons he could never date me, we just talked about what we had been up to, how I was loving Chicago, how proud he was of me for gigging out there, how he was opening a comedy club in Berlin. And then we talked about me coming home.

  ‘You know when you come back, it’s going to be Gert’s wedding.’ Gert was his assistant, who I’d first met in Edinburgh. I got on super well with her; she knew about my undying love for Klaus and was always hopeful we would get together.

  ‘I know! I can’t wait.’

  ‘I could meet you at the airport, take you home.’

  ‘Ahh, that would be lovely, I’d like that.’

  ‘Yeah, it would be nice, we can go to the wedding together. You never know, maybe afterwards, how do you know I’m not gonna propose to you?!’

  My heart skipped a beat. This is it, it’s happening, Chicago worked, the universe loves me, this is it. And I was on cloud nine for the entire day, I could not stop smiling, he’d said ‘HOW DO YOU KNOW I’M NOT GONNA PROPOSE TO YOU?!’ Those actual words.

  I mean it was kinda in jest but also, you wouldn’t even joke about something like that unless there was a hint of truth. Oh my God, this is it. Do I want to marry him? Don’t worry about that, he wants to marry me, potentially. NO, he was joking, wasn’t he? I don’t know, who cares, he said it! Yay! I am in love again, scrap that, not again, it never left, I just suppressed it until I got depressed and now I can let my love run free again, yay love!!!

  After that initial break in the no-contact rule, we would start calling each other regularly. Just shoot the breeze about his day and my day. I would finish my Second City class and run outside on the street to get reception and make the call. I could only grab him at certain times before he would get busy with his day. Me and Klaus were back on and I could not have been happier.

  There was maybe a week of bliss, and then we got so comfortable talking again, we had the following conversation. It’s a Tuesday, 9 p.m. I have just come out of my clowning class where the exercise was to make a rose out of tissue and go and give it as a gift to someone on the street without telling the person or asking permission. It was awesome. I was buzzing after the class and was stood outside Walmart talking to Klaus.

  ‘God it’s soo good to talk to you. I just don’t know Luisa, I don’t know what I want. I wish I was in love, I want to be in love, like really in love.’

  Oh. Hang on, say what? That’s different. Here I am stood outside a Walmart in the freezing cold, they don’t call it the windy city for nothing, and here he is rabbiting away as if I am just some old platonic friend and he drops that little bombshell. ‘I wish I was in love.’ I mean, I know English isn’t his first language; he must have got it wrong. Maybe he meant like he wishes I was there and we were going on dates like a loved-up couple? No. Maybe he meant like he was in love with me but it’s not easy. No. Maybe he didn’t think and of course he loves me, he tells me all the time he does. No. That doesn’t sit right either.

  I asked him to clarify, you know, give him a chance to correct his English, but no, he did it again in that clumsy way of his: ‘I just wish I was in love, you know?!’ Bam. You can take the man out of Germany . . .

  Part of me felt sick and resentful and was desperate to get this man out of my life. But the other part of me was so desperate to talk to him. Which one would be the lesser evil? Talk to him? Don’t talk to him? Listen to what he is saying, Luisa! I couldn’t get over that line. As much as I tried and tried, I couldn’t twist ‘I wish I was in love’ into ‘I love you, Luisa’.

  My brief comfort from hearing his voice quickly turned into cold isolation. In that moment I felt lonelier listening to his familiar voice on the phone, than I had done the whole time living by myself in a foreign country.

  12.

  LIKE A VIRGIN (SORT OF)

  I feel very happy at the back of a comedy club, listening to the audience as I wait to go on. Doesn’t matter where I am, that feeling of being huddled in the back of a dark room on a comedy night is very familiar, and it’s universal, pretty much with every comedy room in any bar in the world. Being there at the back of the room is very comforting.

  I tried to convince myself to make the effort and have sex with someone else. Ideally fall in love with them, that would get me away from
Klaus. I would go to a couple of bars and just sit there and wait for Prince Charming to come and chat me up, it would make such a great story of how we met for the grandkids. But it never happened. I never did get the fairy tale, even the Pretty Woman one where I’m a prostitute and a client falls in love with me. From day one I have only really gone after men who weren’t right for me.

  I was 19 when I lost my virginity. I always wanted to do it to ‘Time of My Life’ from Dirty Dancing. I love music; songs are my emotional soundtrack and diary. I always remember a feeling from a song. It’s my favourite thing to do sometimes, just listen to old playlists and remember like a diary extract the feelings from my life.

  When I was younger and used to love Cher, I would always listen out for her songs as a sign. I would listen to ‘Save Up All Your Tears’ and would think of her telling me not to cry. As I got older, my Cher sign song was ‘Believe’; whenever a relationship was definitely over, that song would come on. That’s how I knew it was definitely, definitely over, because ‘Believe’ would come on.

  Anyhow, when it came to my virginity song, I played my favourite game: predict your future with song shuffle (you’ll notice I play this game a lot!). On this particular occasion I said, ‘Next song that comes on the radio is the song I am going to lose my virginity to’ and lo and behold, ‘Time of My Life’ came on.

  I put on the CD when I had sex for the first time. I hated every second of it. The sex, not the song (at least I had experienced that before). It was awful and he treated me like shit. It was a man called Dave, drug addict, rough childhood, mentally unstable Dave. The first man to pay me attention, and I was so willing to love, I jumped on him. He was the kinda man who on New Year’s Eve, when I was working, went up to my best friend and said, ‘Tell Luisa I am going home with someone else tonight.’

  I was a virgin at the time; nine months later I slept with him. I can call him mental, but you attract people for a reason. If I’d had a healthier opinion of myself, of love and relationships, I would have bounced. But for some reason I decided he was the one I would have sex with.

  So I did, on his grandma’s living room floor. I put the Dirty Dancing soundtrack in the CD player and the final song came on; afterwards he said ‘I can’t deal with this Luisa’ and went to sleep in his grandma’s room. Didn’t see him again after that.

  I don’t know why I was in such a hurry to lose it, other than the fact that I didn’t want to be 19 and the only virgin at university.

  Maybe if socially we were encouraged to enjoy a healthy sexual appetite and relationships, virginity wouldn’t be such a huge ordeal and there wouldn’t be the pressure associated with it. Having sex should be normal, it should be educative and awakening, it should be healing and desirable and fun. It’s something you gain, you gain insight. Not lose innocence. I can suck a dick a day and still have innocence. How about we stop making women feel GUILTY for taking part in what’s natural? Such bollocks.

  Sex is absolutely precious, and the person you share your body with, that is your choice, your life. It is sensual and powerful and a vital part of life to experience. I loved having sex in a relationship; I can see why people miss it so much. It’s way better than doing it on your own all the time.

  Eight weeks into Chicago and my plan to just meet someone else and fall in love wasn’t happening. However I did fall head over heels in friendship with a gorgeous woman called Kalinda. I was sat at the bar, she was with a friend and we just hit it off and got on so well. She became my Chicago bestie. She lived and breathed kindness. At Thanksgiving she invited me to her family home five hours’ drive away, where I was welcomed, fed a feast, went on a zip line and shot a gun. I shat myself and swore never to hold one again. They made me shoot at some wood, like they do it for fun. In America, it’s their thing. Guns = Fun. Irony is not lost.

  We went to the local church, which was the most expensive church I have ever seen. Not in a laced-with-gold kinda way, no, it was way more subtle that that. It was enormous, bigger than a football stadium, and had some of the most advanced technology I had ever seen in a church. A massive stage, huge speakers, big white screen, iPads as you came in. It was like a concert stadium but a church. The pastor was preaching and I was amazed. This guy was like a headliner at a comedy club; he had the audience in the psalm of his hand. Get it, psalm? Oh never mind.

  He was talking about virginity and how precious it is and how women should never give it away. Hold up? I was with you until that bit. Then in plain English (American) he went on: ‘In my past devil life I slept with dirty women, evil women, where the Lord was testing me and I failed, I failed the Lord. I was with prostitutes and I regret the pain I caused the Lord. But then the Lord forgave me, forgave me and blessed me with a new life. A good blessed life. Being married, making love to my wife is like making love for the first time, every time. I speak to you young women of the audience. Give your husband God’s great gift, let him love you for the first time.’

  I felt sick. This was disgusting. I looked around hoping to see eyes of disdain, but all I saw was awe. Surely this dude shouldn’t be allowed a microphone, let alone an audience of 1,000 people. Wow, welcome to America.

  I watched Kalinda as she was looking on, not in shock, but in agreement, she was smiling in agreement. I felt like I was in ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ and I’m going ‘Am I the only one who can see this guy is naked?!!’ Kalinda was just beaming at this preacher, her mother and father standing next to her proudly. They didn’t intervene, they didn’t hold her ears, they didn’t say to her ‘Sweet child, no’; they beamed. And Kalinda could sense that I was staring at her like I was watching a cow give birth. Kalinda, who I loved and adored, with a heart of gold, turned to me and whispered, ‘Luisa I am still a virgin’ and smiled. I wanted to cry for her.

  I didn’t like this church at all. A preacher who himself had enjoyed multiple partners was telling women to save themselves. I wanted to shoot him, but then I remembered I am not American, plus God wouldn’t like that.

  Jesus seemed like a cool guy, not an anally retentive misogynist. Why are men given this platform to spew such damaging venom? How is this legal? Worst of all, how is it mainstream? A man preaching to a woman on how she should use her sexuality. That is, a man controlling a woman’s sexual behaviour. If a man has control of a woman’s sexual behaviour, she is not independent and she is not then allowed to learn and take responsibility for herself. This is rape culture, where a woman’s sexuality and worth are controlled by a man. Control is power. Rape is power.

  I was brought up Catholic. The books at school were pretty standard: share, be nice, be kind, God loves you. But as I have got older, I have moved further and further away from the Church. It just seems very man-made and man-run. I don’t feel it embraces all the facets and delicacy and beautiful infrastructure that is human nature and womanhood.

  It’s not been an overnight process, but as I have got older, I have started to question things I always took as standard. Art, for example.

  Historic artwork in public galleries is all by men. Always dudes, guys, boys, men. Seldom is artwork by women depicted in the history floors. When I was younger I was like, wow, women must be really bad at painting, writing, designing things. A woman creates art and maybe if she is lucky, one woman in every generation will have it displayed. Whereas a man creates art, it is celebrated for generations. Throughout history how many female artists are there that are undiscovered, why hasn’t their work been published? Why is a man’s art more revered than a woman’s? A woman wasn’t even allowed to create art. Didn’t have access to supplies or teaching and if they did and they developed, that would often be seen as something they do in the home, to pass their time. Sketching and knitting.

  Why? The whole point of art is creation, and women deliver the ultimate act of creation I guess: pro-creation. Is that what it is? Womb envy on some level. We can create life, and that in itself is so powerful and perhaps threatening to the limitations of the male anatom
y. What better way to regain control and ego than by undermining and controlling a woman’s ability to create life. Shame her vagina. Judge bitches on sex. Are dudes ultimately scared of the vagina? I don’t know. The guys I meet aren’t, they quite happily bury their heads in one, but then why through history, and especially in religion, are women judged in this way?

  This notion of virginity is just another means of control. A woman’s virginity is precious and should be saved for a man to enjoy, whereas men are encouraged to lose theirs as quickly as possible.

  I always got the maths confused on this one. How come boys can have loads of partners but a girl can only do it that one time with someone special? Surely that can only be achieved if there is like a five-to-one female to male ratio. Also the language, ‘losing your virginity’. You don’t lose something. Your virginity is for you to have sex, it doesn’t mean you’ve lost anything.

  There is no in-between, how could there be? A woman must not lose her virginity until she is married, and if she does have sex before then, she is a scandalous whore. I don’t understand why the public perception of women’s sexuality has been so controlled, perpetuated and narrated by men. Why? What are they so scared of?

  I would like to think I am my own woman and can fuck who I like, but you are not going to make me feel shame for my body and how I use it. Like shaming women for breastfeeding in public. Why is my form up for public scrutiny, and not just my form, but my natural design as a woman? Why are you scrutinising my nature? Women around the world have their sexual organs used against them daily.

  The sexualisation of women is a constant source of debate. Women’s magazines, porn, breastfeeding in public. Our bodies are covered in shame. Who set up and started the rhetoric? My cunt is amazing; every woman I know in my life is amazing and strong and powerful. We are capable of giving birth. We are also capable of great pleasure. We are goddesses, and I say that with no uncertainty. You are a goddess.