A dirtbag tour of D.C. with memoirist Rax King

Washington Post

4 days ago

Rax King is not going to steal anything from the Georgetown Brandy Melville. Not today, anyway. But she's eyeing those lace camisoles.
'You, like, pretend to be looking at it, and then you just crumple it in your hand,' she says. The M Street store, she notes, is staffed by a bunch of bored-looking teenagers. 'But you gotta not look around. That is key.'
'Shoplifting from Brandy Melville' is one of the chapters in 'Sloppy,' King's latest book of irreverent personal essays about her history of indulging in bad behavior and vices including cocaine, petty theft and dishonesty. She's sober now, but she isn't about to let that get in the way of a good time. So we're having, in King's words, a 'dirtbag' tour of D.C., her hometown — a journey through highfalutin Georgetown to visit all the places that made King the sloppy broad she is today.
'Are you gonna go shmy around?'
That's what King's father would ask her whenever he used to drop her off in Georgetown as a teenager. Shmying — 'Yiddish for, like, wander aimlessly,' she says — is something that King has been doing all her life, professionally, spiritually, existentially.
There, near the Key Bridge, is the first place she ever purchased alcohol. Over there, by the canal, is where she used to meet up with her dad for his office smoke breaks. And our next stop is up the hill toward Good Guys, the Wisconsin Avenue strip club — not the same one where she used to work as a dancer, but it will do.
'I don't really have a lot of shame around the sorts of things that I think we are taught to feel shame around,' she says. 'It's not embarrassing to me, really, to talk about times I was blackout drunk, times I hooked up with somebody unsuitable.'
Lucky for us. We get to read about it.
To misquote Tolkein: Not all who shmy are lost. Maybe they're just collecting material.
King, 33, and I have several things in common — careers as writers, a deep love for and long residence in D.C., an affection for Yiddish. We're even wearing a version of the same outfit: black maxi dress with chunky shoes. But I'm like a cheugy, goody-two-shoes, uncool version of her, and I'm losing this game of 'Never Have I Ever,' big time. I have no tattoos. I have never shoplifted or done hard drugs. I've also never been to a strip club. That's about to change.
King warns me that the ATMs at the club will charge a fee, so we stop at a bank nearby with machines that somehow, miraculously, dispense singles. The touch screen asks me how many I want.
'The etiquette is you should tip a dollar per dancer per song,' says King, advising me to take out $75. 'It adds up kind of quickly.'
Because the machine does not allow you to type in the amount of each bill you want, I begin hitting the plus sign 75 times.
Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.
'I'll show you how to fold your money' in the club, says King, offering up a Strip Club 101 lesson — the seats right beneath the three stages, called the 'tip rail,' are seats where 'you have to be tipping the whole time,' she says, though not every customer respected the etiquette.
BeepBeepBeepBeepBeep.
Some guys, she says, 'would do anything to get out of tipping. I had a guy open a newspaper' — The Washington Post, probably, she notes — 'in front of his face once when I came around.'
Beep. Beep. Beep.
The machine dispenses a pleasingly fat wad of cash.
No, it's not her real name. The name 'Rax' sounds like one of the syllables in her given name, and King just sounded good with it, she says. But unlike many authors who use a pen name to maintain a separation between their writerly persona and their real life, Rax King is just who she was always meant to be.
'I don't even think of it as my real name anymore,' she says of her given name, which she has asked The Post not to include here. 'Even my mom calls me Rax.'
Though she now lives in Brooklyn with her husband and nearly toothless Pekingese, King can recite her D.C. bona fides: She went to the Field School. She used to go to punk shows at Fort Reno and Mt. Pleasant group houses. King has two D.C. flag tattoos — one between her shoulder blades and another on her upper arm. Her book name-drops old-school D.C. institutions, including boutiques Annie Creamcheese and Commander Salamander.
King went to college at St. John's, the liberal arts college in Annapolis, Maryland, known for its Great Books curriculum. Though she loved developing a deep well of literary references, she didn't fit in on campus — 'I found myself at odds with the culture of the place a lot' — and struggled to complete her degree, in part because she was in an abusive marriage, the subject of several of her essays, including 'Love, Peace, and Taco Grease,' her James Beard-nominated essay about how watching Guy Fieri's 'Diners, Drive-ins and Dives' gave her courage to escape her abuser.
That essay became a chapter in her first book, 'Tacky,' which examined the pleasures of lowbrow taste — of loving the band Creed, 'The Jersey Shore' and the Cheesecake Factory, and not even in a detached, ironic, guilty pleasure sort of way. She wrote about getting drunk, doing drugs and sleeping around.
And then she got sober.
It's 4 p.m. on a Monday, which ranks among the most depressing times to visit a strip club. After our eyes adjust to the darkness, it's clear that there are only two other patrons there. Wimbledon is playing on the televisions, and a stripper is gyrating on the stage.
King orders a Shirley Temple — 'It's kind of my sobriety drink' — counting seven maraschino cherries in her glass. She tells the bartender that she used to dance but has retired.
'Once a midnight ballerina, always a midnight ballerina,' says our bartender, chirpy in a corset and fishnets.
King was not a very good dancer, she writes in the 'Sloppy' essay 'Temple of Feminine Perfection.' She auditioned to become a dancer at a D.C. club — one that has since closed and come under new ownership — for two men who 'never looked any less bored,' only to be told to slow down instead of doing spastic choreography 'like I was leading a Jazzercise class,' and 'sweating and panting with exhaustion before the song even hit its halfway mark.'
'I quickly adopted the same thing as many of my co-workers: just go up, move as little as possible, as little effort as possible,' she says now, watching the girls of Good Guys twirl languidly on the pole.
Oh, and the way to fold the bills is longitudinally. 'My theory is that the vertical way, they don't slide out' of a garter belt, King says.
Somewhere in Washington, someone orders a burger from the strip club via delivery. We know this because a confused driver walks into the club to procure his customer's order. The staff makes him wait outside. No free shows.
Ella, a skinny dancer wearing a crop top that says 'Can U Not' and not much else, comes over.
'Are y'all together?' she asks us. 'Y'all look good together … I'mma come sit with you. I love your tattoo,' she says to King about her collarbone ink, which says 'I can't go on, I'll go on,' from Samuel Beckett.
Before Ella is called up to dance, she chats with us about her dog (150 pounds), how she does her lashes ('Get the clusters and put them on underneath'), her ex-boyfriend (a cheater!) and her poetry.
'How did you get out of the stripping? It's addicting, right?' Ella asks, and King agrees — it's how she paid her student loans. But it was stripping that, eventually, rejected her: 'I'd moved to a new place and I auditioned at one club. They didn't want me. I had a shaved head at the time and I think they didn't like it. And then I just kind of gave up.'
Ella notices that I'm wearing a wedding ring.
'What's your husband look like?' she asks me. 'If I ever see him in here, I'll kill him.' A girl's girl. Ella! We love her, and it seems like she returns our affection, but King reminds me that it's her job to make every single person feel like she is excited to see them. It was the part of the job she loathed.
'I hated talking to customers,' King says. 'I loved to get off stage and hide.'
'You're the best,' King tells Ella, when we're ready to depart.
'Stop!' Ella says. 'I'm going to cry, baby, I cry every day.'
'Me too!' King says. 'For no reason sometimes.'
'You know what's crazy?' Ella says. 'I've told these girls I haven't cried in years, and I cry every day. I cry, I really cry.'
'Every day there's something to cry about,' King says.
It may be true that cutting drugs and alcohol out of one's life helps one become a better person who feels and loves more deeply. That cliché exists for a reason. But it's still a cliché. In 'Sloppy,' King subverts it by being the same person she always was. She still tells lies, and sort of hates having to interact with people. She finds sobriety deeply boring, a feeling she constantly struggles to get past. She still gets sticky fingers: 'The last time I went into a Brandy Melville with an intent to steal was, like, six months ago.'
'She is capable of being so emotionally honest and forthright and raw, and still so incredibly funny. And it is hard to do that in a way that doesn't feel hokey,' says her friend Calvin Kasulke, author of 'Several People are Typing.' 'Talking about recovery and not sounding incredibly trite is incredibly difficult.'
'While your life is supposedly improving, every minute of it is dilating,' she writes in the book's final essay, a meditation on addiction inspired by 'The Wolf of Wall Street.' 'It's not that you never feel good; it's that the good feelings now burble up so slowly to the surface of your bog, leaving you mired in monotony the rest of the time.' She quotes Jordan Belfort, from the film: 'It's so boring I want to kill myself.'
The writing isn't boring, though. 'Her sense of humor and her sense of righteousness and desire to engage with the world is all still there and super vibrant,' says comic Josh Gondelman, a former writer for 'Last Week Tonight with John Oliver' and a friend.
The same goes for all of the other character-building moments that King revisits for the sake of the book: Growing up the child of alcoholics ('My family are drunks the way other families are Teamsters or actors'). Her smoker father ('A filthy, smelly, weak hero') and his battle with chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder. Her time spent in a psychiatric hospital after a suicide attempt. (Making friends there was 'like speed dating in Jonestown, or doing a fun icebreaker exercise with the hostages during a bank robbery.')
'I still catch myself with these, like, low-life instances and tendencies for no reason at all. There's an essay in that book about lying, and to this day, my husband will ask me, 'What'd you do today?' And there's this little voice in my head, like, lie about it, when I haven't done anything bad, just for sport,' she says. 'Even when you get rid of the substance, the behavior doesn't go away on its own.'
'Sloppy' is, in part, about what it's like to be a screwup in a city of try-hards. It's just as much of a D.C. story as any political memoir, even though King's only interactions with D.C.'s political class have been when they were her customers.
'For all that my book is an unusual piece of D.C. lore,' King says, 'it's not an unusual experience.'
After all: People grow up here, and make art, and do drugs, and get in trouble, and work in strip clubs, and fumble around between jobs. The shoplifters, the dirtbags, the midnight ballerinas: It's their city too.
They shmy around until they figure out who they are. Or maybe they never do.