Glitter Guide: Buy the F*cking Leather, Drink the F*cking Champagne, Meet your F*cking ~Soulmate~
Listen to your lesbian big sister. Times are BLEAK. Sisters like Eduardo help.
I’m in SAKS Fifth Avenue in Sarasota, Florida and I’m very young and very desperately scanning the shop floor for a leather jacket. I’ve just realized I’m a dyke which means purchasing an expensive leather jacket is my right of fucking passage.
It’s 6 p.m. and the store is teeming with plastered women clumsily clutching champagne flutes whilst feverishly pawing at exorbitant apparel.
I’m at one of those genius shopping events where stores get their customers Nice & Hammered™ before encouraging them to drop 3k on a handbag made in China that’s already two seasons too late.
“Do youuths thinkth this is chic?” A sun-fried woman slurs to another sun-fried woman. They both have short haircuts. Not cool lesbian short haircuts. A Kate Gosselin circa 2001 haircut. A “Isn’t IT FUN?” midwest chop.
“Honey, I think you destherve it.” The woman slurs back to her friend. The garment in question is a black and white striped maxi dress with long sleeves. I think it’ll look nice on the sun-fried, short-haired lady so I tell her.
“You should totally get it,” I pipe with great authority as if I’m fucking Anna Wintour—not a twenty-two-year-old Twink with hormonal acne and a head full of ratty clip-in extensions purchased at Sally’s Discount Beauty Supply for under a hundred.
The women smile at me kindly, and we clink champagne glasses. I’m overcome by the warm wave of sisterhood. It swells in my chest and crashes into my heart. “You deservth the dress,” I slur in solidarity to my new friends.
I wink at my new short-haired friends and twirl into the abyss.
My eyes suddenly zero in on a black leather jacket with shoulder pads that look like arrows pointing toward the sky.
THUMP THUMP THUMP.
My heart pitter-patters like I've just done a bump of cocaine.
I set my flute of champagne on a little shelf peppered with the latest Juicy Couture eau de parfum—VIVA LA JUICY!—and hungrily tear the jacket off its hanger.
I feel rabid. Like a dog biting into the dead flesh of an elk.
I slither like a snake into buttery leather.
I don’t need to look in the mirror to know it fits but I do my due diligence out of moral obligation to the council of Department Store Etiquette.
I might feel like a savage but I don’t act like one. Ever. I'm British.
I swag like a 1950s dapper dyke toward the mirror. The lights are florescent and age me a decade—
but I look more *myself* than ever before.
I *feel* more myself than ever before.
“YOU HAVE TO BUY THAT JACKET! YOU HAVE TO BUY THAT JACKET!” A voice bellows behind me. There’s a sexy, Mexican lilt to the voice.
I whip my head around and attach the voice to the boy.
I’m instantly taken by his looks. He’s gamine, fawn-like. His eyes are mocha brown, and large and pressing like Bambi.
His skin is golden rosy like it’s just been kissed by the rich bitch sun. I envision him just having arrived at SAKS, fresh off the jet, after a long ski holiday with his best friend Princess Eugenie, somewhere sunny and snowy; glamorously dull and regally inaccessible; the Swiss Alps.
He’s wearing a steamed blue button-down and the kind of black “dress pants” a young student might wear for the orchestra recital. His legs are long and lean: Deer legs.
He extends a bronzed hand toward me.
“I’m Eduardo,” his eyes twinkle, he’s gay Santa.
“I’m Zara.” My eyes twinkle back, I’m a dyke Santa.
“I know your mom,” he purrs, quietly.
“You do?” I perform surprise. Of course, he does. She takes all Floridian homosexuals under a certain age under her seasoned hag wing and mentors them closely.
“Yes. She’s a client at the salon at The Met. I work at the salon at The Met.”
“Oh shit.” I twirl a lock of matted weave around my finger. “I actually know who you are.”
Eduardo smiles so brightly that the fluorescent light bulbs flicker above our heads.
“She talks about you all the time,” I admit. She does.
“Shall we grab some more champagne?” Eduardo asks, linking his arm to mine. The subtext of Shall We Grab Some More Champagne is Want to be best friends for life?
“Fuck yes,” I say to the champagne and the best friendship.
I buy the jacket.
It’s the first time I’ve ever spent big girl money in my life.
It’s so worth it.
People stop me in the street and moan: whereeee did you get that?
A cool-girl model I know peripherally who never remembers my name even though we’ve met two dozen times (which only makes me idolize her more), buys it too. I run into her at a party and she tells me she bought it because she saw a picture of me wearing it and just had to have it. This time she remembers my name and I spontaneously come in new Hudson jeans, for multiple reasons.
I stay in Sarasota for six months to regroup before moving to London and Eduardo and I are in a rapid-fire friendship romance, we’re like U-Hauling lesbians except we don’t scissor, and neither of us have a driver’s license and are quite happy living with our respective parents, rent-free.
Eduardo and I go out every night to a dive bar downtown called “Smoking Joes.” We start calling it “Smoking Lows” because it’s a dark crowd. It’s all heartbroken misfits screaming into buckets of gin. I like it because you can smoke inside and I'm an aspiring actress and it’s the age of Kate Moss and I’m nothing if not ambitious—so cigarettes are an essential part of my diet, obviously.
I try and make up for all the Marlboros by being healthy in other ways, though. Like sometimes I tuck bright orange sachets of powdered Vitamin C into the zipper of my fake Chanel and sprinkle it into our Vodka diet cokes around midnight.
“This will stop you from getting a hangover in the morning,” I always lecture Eduardo with great pride.
The truth is we don’t get hungover.
We’re babies and despite the fact that we smoke and drink like we’re going to the electric chair multiple nights a week—we’re obnoxiously healthy and have no idea how good we have it.
We have no idea how bad it’s all going to get in just a few short years: the hangovers, the bloat, the anxiety.
By 1 a.m. Eduardo is always wearing the leather jacket I bought at SAKs.
And it looks fucking good on him.
“We’re the only people who can fit into this jacket,” I insufferably meow into his ear —which isn’t true, we’re not the only twinks in town who can squeeze an arm into it. I know this because drunken baby gays always ask me to try it on at the club and I always say yes and it always fits them like a glove.
Eduardo laughs wickedly when I talk about how hot we look in my leather.
If only we knew that ten years later we’d be on the streets of Soho lamenting so loudly about our COVID-19 weight gain that a man thinks we’re talking about wanting to get sober.
“It’s unmanageable!” I squeal down Prince Street.
“That’s step one!” The man yells back, “I’ve been in AA for ten years. It works if you work it!”
We didn’t know then that I’d scream back “Thank you! Please be my sponsor!” and we’d cackle about the whole interaction over $22 glasses of Sauvignon Blanc at a restaurant called “Antique Garage” on Mercer Street.
We didn’t know then that in the thick of the global pandemic, I’d be wearing red lipstick daily for the first and only time, and he’d be contemplating buying 4-inch platform boots by Alexander McQueen (he still is).
The truth is, we didn’t know anything in those days.
That’s why they were so much fun.
We lived for the night.
We lived for the wild eccentrics we’d meet at the club who we’d become magnetized to like moths to a flame.
We didn’t know any better than ordering cheap plastic bottled liquor and never thought to question why our bills were eerily low at the end of the night.
At 3 a.m. Eduardo would not only be wearing my jacket but also my big quilted fake Chanel purse and we’d stumble into the streets, looking for a cab.
Once safely inside, we’d yab to the cab driver that we were fraternal twins. I’d draw freckles across the bridge of Eduardo’s nose with a brown wet n’ wild eye pencil. We’d hold each other up as we attempted to sneak into my parent’s house gracelessly like whatever the opposite of a Ballerina is.
I’d hush the barking dog and Eduardo would sit on the kitchen counter and we’d binge on hunks of Swiss cheese. We’d eat till there was no room left in our young bellies and then we’d crawl up to my bedroom and pass out in our makeup.
In the morning we’d wake up fresh as daisies and drink giant cups of English tea with my English mother and fill her in on all the gossip.
“I think the guy is gay and has a crush on Eduardo,” I’d say breezily.
“Oh, Eduardo! Do you fancy him?” My mum would ask, draped in a satin pink robe, her long cool blonde hair dancing across gleaming clavicles.
“He’s not my type.” Eduardo would say primly. Case closed.
One time we asked a sweet redneck we met at the dive bar to take us for a ride in the bed of his truck.
“I’ve always wanted to ride in the bed of a truck,” I exclaimed.
“Me too!” Eduardo gasped placing a manicured hand against his heart.
The redneck was down to clown, so we skipped down the street and hopped like bunnies into the bed of his truck.
I felt excited like I was going on Safari in East Africa.
We bounced around in the back of this stranger’s truck as we observed downtown Sarasota from a whole new lens. The humid air felt light and breezy as we whizzed down main street.
“This is SO fun,” I screamed loud enough for the redneck truck driver to hear over the Christian rock blasting from his speakers. He grinned and waved at us. “You’re good kids,” he mouthed through the rearview.
We were good kids. Good kids who had no idea how much danger we put ourselves in back then.
We snorted poppers on dance floors, hopped into cars with strangers, found ourselves at after-parties at crack dens, and leaped into strangers’ cars again and again and again.
Our guardian angels had to retire the next year from so much exhaustion. They kept us protected, and we’re grateful for their work. We had no idea what we put them through.
We recklessly took shots of adventure and washed it down with cheap champagne.
I was happy back then.
I had everything I needed: I had my leather and my best friend.
Loooooooove!
This so f*cking priceless, I wanna read it out loud to all my friends IMMEDIATELY 🥂