What Happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas – right?
I was in Las Vegas, Nevada earlier this month and what happened to me there I mostly left behind and what stayed with me, I released into the coral pink sands of Utah.
Vegas, all hard glitter and harder sun. Born from a mobster’s wet dream of making legit money and some kind of social respectability. The Rat Pack’s playground of the best entertainers in the biz and then the bloated corporate take over of today selling Lady Luck to flip flops and khaki shorts. This is America.
Vegas today is also home to some of the mot lucrative circus/cabaret shows in the US and internationally. Fun, shiny, circus under the umbrella of Spiegelworld and named Absinthe or Opium just to name a few. Cirque Du Soleil is still running strong, the circus has arrived in the desert and found refuge there.
The world I lived and moved through in NYC was populated with quite a few of these circus/cabaret performers and I had the great pleasure of living with, playing with, sometimes performing with, and photographing these fabulous individuals for quite a few years. One of my best friends was doing a circus cabaret show recently in Vegas and thats why I came there and had the total pleasure of reconnecting with her beautiful heart-light and also that lovely spectacle that the circus always is, wherever you meet once again.
It was coming back from one of these shows that i had my own run in with being unsafe and reminded how vulnerable I can be as a woman in this country. On a journey of investigation in American women stories of vulnerability and in the need of safety, it makes heart-sense to include my own. We are all in this together.
This is what i remember. I’m walking across a bridge, leaving The Strip behind me as i move in the warm, desert night. Darker over here away from the big lights, makes me more relaxed. I walk to my truck, just twenty minutes away, I’m used to walking places, always have. I don’t know Vegas, I don’t know where you are “supposed” to walk or “not to supposed” to walk in this town, not a delineation I’ve ever been that much interested in or ever dissuaded me in the past. I’m just walking. The air feels fine in the dark after the fire of afternoon desert sun. I round a corner – i’m on Jerry Lewis Way I notice with a grin, about to intersect with Dean Martin Drive, partners even in intersections.
Then the stalking game begins; black, four door sedan creeping along side me all of a sudden. They do this, those men in their cars, appear out of nowhere seemingly, thrusting themselves into my reality by their creepy creep car stalking shenanigans, raising my hackles immediately with their bullshit sexual intimidation tactics. Obviously, this scenario has occurred before in my life, quite a bit actually. I would walk or ride my bike everywhere over the years and this car stalking has been a regular occurrence and has never not put my teeth immediately on edge. Makes me want to bite. The quiet ominous big black thing like a shark biding its time rolling along side me, the anonymous male – it has never, not once, been a woman doing this – hiding behind all that dark metal, hiding and advertising his need simultaneously. Trying to make me scared and capitulate simultaneously. Makes me want to bite. My warm relaxed night, shattered and now i’m zeroed in on this stupid, sexual power struggle between myself and this creeping black car.
So, this goes on for an endless span of seconds where I ignore the stalking shark and he continues to roll along side me, Then he speeds up and turns the corner and in no time for me to smooth my hackles and relax again, he’s back, the dark shark. This also always happens, upping the ante by the speed up and then circling back with more force and more need. This time, he inches closer to the curb, slows down even more, almost up on the curb now and rolls down all his windows. Here we are, just he and I and he’s already assessed every inch of me and I haven’t even seen his face. But I feel him, most definitely I feel him and all that strange need.
And I’m not having it. I don’t want that fucking weird need so fuck right off and leave me alone! And thats what i say into the gaping open windows and to underline that statement I spit out the ice cubes I had been sucking on and throw the rest of my water thats in the cup I’m carrying through those open scary windows that hide all that scary weird fucked up energy trapped in that dark car – get away from me and stop trying to frighten me!
Then everything happens in fast forward/slow motion. The hiding need jumps out of his shark car shouting and swearing at me, all rage dark star force, tall and wide as a house, man-muscles clearly defined because he has no shirt on to better display all those man-muscles.
Rage shouting, “Don’t you know who I am?!?” “Bitch!” “Don’t you know who I am?”
Yes, I know who you are. You are fear compounded into rage after years, centuries, millennia of being treated like shit and made to feel inadequate until you became inadequate and surrendered your fear and suffering into rage and learned how to attack women to access your sense of strength and safety. Yes, I know who you are.
Every woman on this planet knows who you are.
So the shark has a face and he moves so fast up to me and as I turn to face the shark, he punches me in the face, right side, my jaw on fire and I’m down. The shark bends down over me and rages and punches me in the face one more time. I’m completely fucking stunned, I’m not anything definite anymore. And then, the shark is gone. It’s over.
I stand up. I am only aware of the fact that my face and jaw feel very hot and adrenaline has taken over. I am also becoming aware that my right wrist and hand are quite hot and I’m experiencing that bloated numbness in my right wrist that occurs when the body is protecting you from the fact that you’ve probably damaged yourself acutely in some way. I feel all that hot and wonder if something got broken when I fell, or broken in my face. I hope not, I am on the road in Las Vegas, Nevada and in the middle of a quest in collecting women’s stories about fear and the need of safety and I have absolutely no time or any personal safety net to be seriously injured. The irony escapes me in the moment. A taxi pulls over and anxious female faces peer out from the back seat and ask if I’m ok, they saw the whole thing, dimly I hear car horns honking, I’ve had an audience the whole time the shark had attacked. I’m fine I say, because that’s what you say and I am standing so I must be some kind of ok.
I’m on my phone already calling my friend who just had performed and who I was getting my truck to pick up, the reason I was walking on such a nice night, to pick up my truck back at the hotel. Connecting with myself again, the growing realization that my wrist really fucking hurt but my face was only warm, talking to my friend with a sob of belated fear when I said I had been attacked by a man on the street.
Cut to back at the hotel. My friend is there, she is all love and concern, its good that she is there. We are able to laugh, we always are and thats what saves us every time. The hotel concierge is also lovely, a very nice woman who gets me ice and calls the police and tells me that she has been mugged before, shares her fear to help with mine, so i don’t feel isolated in my experience. Thats what we women do for each other. We round up the wagons and create a circle of protection and give comfort and make each other smile. We create refuge, sanctuary, for each other in the face and resulting repercussions of all that strange, male, need that we experience daily in one way or another.
The police finally come. This is what happens:
Then there is the next day. My wrist is sprained from how i fell on it after being punched in the face by the shark. Its in a brace and will be a pain in the ass traveling rough the way I am for this project. I can handle it. My face is fine, not even a bruise and thats what stays with me even now, the ease in which this man could punch a woman in the face and leave no mark. The ease in which this man could punch a woman in the face once and then again when she was down on the ground. The policeman said that where i was walking was a known prostitute hang out street and most likely the shark was a pimp. How well this man knew to pull back on the strength of his blow, strong enough to shut me up but not strong enough to damage the merchandise. That practiced knowledge breaks my heart.
Here I am on that next day. I’m smiling and having fun because as my good friend, said there in Vegas, “You Sara, are always undaunted.” That is a true statement. I have experienced violence at the hands of men before in my life, most women have. That violence has happened over my forty-six years in being alive and its been harmful and painful and scary, but I have been lucky and not been permanently broken or killed, so I carry on and live the life I choose, undaunted.
I hung out with this beautiful circus child that afternoon who asked me if I wanted some of her strength. She offered this unsolicited and with a confident grin on her face. It was an earnest offer of her gift and I accepted, we held hands and she transferred some of her strength she could spare over to me, I was in need in that moment. I enjoyed the circus family that day – one of which had actually been in that honking car trying to scare off the shark the night before and witnessed part of the attack, how strange the circle of that!
I was safe, it could have been so much worse. That what we women tell ourselves in those situations, how it could be so much worse and those horrific almost happenings picture-float through my mind because those much worse situations happen all the time, to other women, my sisters.
I’m going to skip forward a bit, a coda if you will.
I left alot of that shark attack in Vegas when I left the next day, but not all of it. I traveled to the Coral Pink Sand Dunes National Park in Utah with the express purpose to blow away the rest of the shark’s hold on my psyche. I’ve performed this kind of release ritual after a violent encounter before, it helps clean out inner space. The landscape in this part of Utah is Mars red and pink and orange and gorgeously alien. Great piles of coral pink sand stretch for seven magic miles and the common human response is dune buggy race the hell out of the landscape, all buzzing, racing mechanical bugs skittering across the surface.
This is where I blew the shark into so much sand. Blew him into the wind that caught his essence up, all his fear, and scattered it amongst all these mountains of similar sand crystals to be reshaped, repurposed, made beautiful.
And here comes the fun, magical part that sugar dusts my life experiences at this point in my life. I experience real, serendipitous magic on a regular basis and I just love its appearance and punctuation.
I’m performing this ritual of transforming the shark into sand and I have a little alter that I’ve created in the sand and doing my releasing thing. I had noticed a black beetle methodically making its way toward me and my circle in the sand and without thinking, I gently diverted its course and thought i had sent it on its way in another direction. As to not be disturbed. I know, I wasn’t paying attention, silly of me. But this beetle was not to be deterred in giving the gift of its animal medicine when I needed it most and when I was specifically calling on it as well. Rude of me to knock on a door and not acknowledge the creature that answers and opens up to me. I open my eyes at one point in my ceremony and I see my beetle friend right near me and I could tell by its surrounding tracks in the sand that it had followed the circumference of the circle that I had drawn in the sand around me, circling me as well and then entering into the circle and outlining my thighs and rear with its tracks before exiting the circle and was currently making its slow, confident way over my notebook and animal medicine tarot cards and heading off into the sand. Its work with me, complete.
I did some research on my beetle visitation and i found that my beetle is known as the Stink or Skunk beetle because it will stand on its head and let out a super stink as protection if feeling threatened – also known as the Circus or Acrobat Beetle due to its ability to stand on its head and stink you. This is all so connective and funny and brilliant as I’ve always admired the skunk and considered that amazing stinky animal a part of my team of animal magic and here this beetle has Skunk magic too. Then the obvious connection to the circus and my bestie happens to be an acrobat – pretty good kismet there. Magic is everywhere you believe it exists, and in my ceremony of blowing away the pain of the shark, I’ll take the help wherever it offers itself.
This is what the Animal Totems: Dictionary of Insects, has to say about my Stink/Skunk/Circus/Acrobat Beetle:
Stink Bug aids with clarifying dreams, visions and insights. She can show the connections between seemingly separate unrelated events with heightened intuition. Pay attention to your instincts about people, situations and circumstances. She can demonstrate the order in which things are done, designating each level in the process of metamorphosis. Increased sensitivity to what is hidden and reading between the lines occurs with Stink Bug medicine. She can be a sharp communicator getting to the point. Are you being direct? She helps protect and shield energy and emotions when needed. She teaches the balance of concealment and surfacing…. Odors have both attractant and repellent qualities. Stink Bug will guide in the proper use and balance of the positive and negative attributes of what is psychically sensed as well as what is physically sensed in your surroundings. Stink Bug medicine shows how to transform and shed what is no longer needed….
So, bye bye shark in the sand, I release you and let you be reimagined beautiful in another sand shape.
This is how I take care of myself. Heal wounds and let go, making myself safe while traveling on the road, the stranger in strange lands.
This is the nature of refuge.
