LOVE INTEREST
Britney likes the word dyke.
With lesbian, its too easy to put lipstick on it,
dress it up in perfect clothes and turn it into something easy, something
sorority sisters do to turn on their jock boyfriends when blowjobs just aren’t doing
it anymore. A phase, a fad, something that passes. Lesbian is something
pink, something pretty. Something fake. Britney’s had enough of people trying
to dumb things down, make them soft and meaningless, all because its her doing
it.
It was that way when she got her tattoo. It wasn’t like
she’d gotten it to shock anyone, but she didn’t expect them to treat it like a
little girl thing, some teenage rebellion. Granted, it was a fairy, a little
baby pink thing with wings, but she likes fairies. She knows all about the real
fairies, too, the ones from Ireland who died and fought and fucked just like
normal people. They had wings, only not in the literal sense.
When all of it falls away, Britney plans to get wings, big
as life over her shoulder blades. It’ll hurt like fuck, but it’ll be worth it.
The fairy had hurt. Right on the small of her back, one of
the most painful places to get it, but she’d just gritted her teeth and took
the pain, turned it into something else. After that it had been bleeding red
for days, until it finally scabbed over black, a hard little charcoal shell in
the form of a winged girl, like the chrysalis for an angel. And then it had
fallen off, and the tattoo was perfect, no matter what people said about it.
Its not just the little things, like the tattoos. The
meaning is stripped out of everything she does, everything she says. If she
talks about how she feels they don’t focus on her words, but instead how she
says them, tongue tripping over her emotions, voice uncertain but impassioned.
If she writes songs, then they take the melodies at face value, or pay
attention to what she wears while she’s singing them. If she strips down to
nothing but a thin layer of nylon and her talent, people just all her a naughty
little tease because they don’t see the person behind the skin.
Even her movie…it was supposed to be different. It wasn’t
supposed to be a girl movie; it wasn’t supposed to be anything. In her head it
was formless, joyous. Her and a car and her girlfriends, screaming along to the
radio so they could hear each other over the wind. Driving too fast on the open
road, talking and laughing and just being with each other.
There wasn’t supposed to be a guy.
But Britney’s character had to have a love interest, no
matter what Britney herself spouted about it being about girls and their friendship
and the very special kind of love
they had with each other. It was bullshit, but it was the kind of bullshit that
her people usually bought.
Unfortunately, the people the studio sent over were not her
people, and the writer only knew enough of her to provide ample screen time for
her navel in the script. Britney still thinks someone, somewhere, recognized
her movie as a dyke flick and sent over some teen writers to defuse the situation.
Lucy got her love interest.
Anson, Justin, Ben, Nick, Steve, whatever. They’re boys.
Britney expresses her love for them, for boys, in interviews because she does
love them. JC, Justin, Andre, Nick, Wade. These are people who have been with
her since she started, people who love her. Their sex is really secondary.
Boys, though, the
song? Well, no one knew what Vogue was really about either. They don’t
get that Britney in the video, in the suit with her hair slicked back, is the
real Britney. They don’t get that when Britney put on that pinstriped suit a
year ago, she wasn’t trying to be sexy, she was trying to celebrate her
sexuality.
Never mind that she stripped it all off to reveal flash and
glitter beneath. That she stopped singing so she could shake her ass to the
beat. It was that first part that she fought for, that first part that she got.
Her and a fedora and wide lapels, her and her real voice singing a song written
for a man, and her doing it twice as well.
But it doesn’t matter what people think of the song, or of
the video. Or of the performance, or of her and Anson, or her and Justin, or
even of the goddamn movie. It doesn’t matter if Crossroads isn’t hers
anymore, because it served its purpose. It was Britney and a car and her girls in
the backseat.
It was long nights in her hotel room, long afternoons in her
trailer, long mornings holding hands in the back of the car, so the camera
wouldn’t see. Crossroads may have made
her fake love for another boy, another friend willing to be her beard, but she
was used to that. Crossroads also
brought her Zoe.
Britney got her love interest.
END
For everyone who
liked Crossroads.
Note: Zoe is Zoe Saldana, one of Brit’s co-stars. I think she’s cute as hell, and she and Brit hit my slash-o-meter. But its just fiction, people.