La Roux — Bulletproof (Nacey Remix feat. Matt Hemerlein) (2009)
A first-person narrative tale of what happens when the beats make the panties drop
I won’t let you turn around
And tell me now, I’m much too proud
To walk away from something when it’s dead
Though I was homeschooled, the day after the last day of the seventh grade at Branksome School in Toronto, Ontario, Canada —yes, some 2,600 miles away from my front door in San Francisco — was massively exciting and important. At 7 PM, Diana Johnson, my girlfriend in secret for the past eight months, was going to emerge, cornrowed, mid-back length brown hair, pierced tongue, and five feet, six inches, and 125 pounds of delicious milky-chocolate skin, from her father’s brand new, tricked out 1998 Range Rover with the custom gold and black leather interior, Bose surround sound speakers and 24-inch rims. Though I didn’t come out of the closet until I was 20, I was definitely in love with Diana at 12.
Her parents were Bobby “The ARMadillo” Johnson and Susan Johnson, a husband and wife tandem known worldwide in the world of competitive arm wrestling as the sport’s most charismatic duo. Bobby was a Nebraska-born failed college football offensive tackle at Wayne State University who was as tall as he was wide. He also had a blonde-dyed Army-style crew cut fade, and always wore a five-years too old and one-size too big piece of old University of Nebraska sports apparel. Susan was a busty, yet frail African-American Lincoln, Nebraska native with black, dyed and permed hair that she wore as if she were the spitting image of Farrah Fawcett, even 20 years too late. They were in San Francisco because of Bobby’s Hollywood-based acting career — a career largely based around the idea that he could be an African-American doppelganger for Sylvester Stallone — flaming out after 1993. After moving, Bobby and Susan took jobs selling Amway products. And, due to their incredible charisma, they had both become millionaires multiple times over selling beauty supplies and nutritional aids throughout the Bay Area.
Diana was a planned-for childbirth. It followed 1983’s North American Arm Wrestling Championships in Quebec, an event where Bobby expected to finish in the top three, ink a commercial sponsorship with NFL helmet-makers Riddell, and then head back to Nebraska with his wife in tow to start a family. He hit the mark on all three goals, and by the time they got back to Lincoln, he was also staring at a contract for “acting services” from HBO to star in what he hoped was 1st and 10, a “football-themed sitcom” they were planning to launch in the next year. Nine months later, Susan gave birth to Diana. For 13 years, it would seem as if there has never been a more doted-upon child in the world. That is unless you didn’t take into account how I was raised…
marcie barbarella is my name because I refuse to go by Marin Thomas, or whatever the French people who adopted me at the age of two called me. Didier and Marce Thomas (said with all of the appropriate long vowels) escaped France when it was invaded by Italy during World War II. Didier had friends in the anchovy shipping industry, so he was able to create a rather fruitful life for himself and his wife in America. I came along in 1987, a surprise birthday gift from Didier to Marce on the occasion of her 61st birthday. I don’t know why someone purchases someone an orphaned black girl with no known parents or family when they’re two decades past menopause, but maybe that’s just me. We later discovered that my aunts and uncles were spread out all over the country, and in typical 70s and 80s black family tradition was a sordid mix of multiple last names and hometowns, from Charlotte and Baltimore to Tallahassee and Tulsa, all reflecting some level of upper-middle-class respectability.
I was in my all-pink second-floor bedroom with the solid oak trundle bed in the corner and mini walk-in closet staring out my window into the paneled-in backyard of the Johnsons, our new next door neighbors. My foster parents weren’t exactly enamored with The Johnsons. While we always defaulted to jazz hits by Dave Brubeck and Duke Ellington, Bobby Johnson seemingly played Redman’s “Time 4 Sum Aksion” on repeat during the first year they lived on the block and the Johnsons were helping their landscapers build out their backyard.
The Johnsons were loud and abrasive, but Diana, their daughter, was delicate, but determined. I’d hear the recoiled, rubberized bounce, then swish, then bounce again, far into the wee hours of the morning on the quarter-court regulation rim and the concrete court that occupied the Northwest corner of their renovated backyard. When I’d watch the NBA, like 50% of the jump shots would either hit the backboard or the rim. When Diana would shoot, the ball seemed to never hit the backboard or the rim. That always struck me as oddly amazing.
Diana ended up going away to school all year long for the better part of three years. Susan and Bobby Johnson divorced when Diana was nine years old. The cause was “irreconcilable differences,” as Bobby’s anabolic steroid use (“these arms don’t stay this big by themselves!”) had caused him to become not violent, but more suicidal and “uncomfortably irritable.” Susan remarried to what Bobby referred to as “some pretty boy NFL benchwarmer ass dude.” And, after Susan had set Diana up to go to boarding school in Canada, the then 12-year-old, in angsty opposition to her mother’s desire to “move on with her life,” opted to move back to San Francisco to live with her father during the summer.
Because of the fact that I obsessively compare everything to music, I’ll say that Diana looked like “thicc Traci Spencer” last summer. When I used to obsessively watch her out of my window, she was reed thin with braces and wide, kinky, and afro-like brown hair. I saw her pull up in her Dad’s ’97 Range Rover last year, and it was like I felt my essence shift. Getting out in her pink sports bra, three sizes too big Toronto Raptors basketball shorts with black thong underwear peeking out the sides, and all-white Scottie Pippen Nike sneakers, I felt nervous, and my palms began to sweat. I was just walking down the street after going to the supermarket, and the idea that I was drinking a Capri Sun while wearing adidas flip flops and a five sizes too big Bad Boy Records t-shirt like it was a sundress felt like it wasn’t a cool enough thing for me to be doing.
We worked together as “Children’s Lifestyle” models at the Nordstrom’s location at the San Francisco Shopping Centre that summer. Diana had more experience than I did. She had been a Toronto Raptors ballgirl, and for me, this may have been my first regular modeling anything. My foster parents were overprotective as hell, so it was the fact that the 350-pound black man with 25-inch arms and bloodshot eyes was scooping Diana and I every day that made the choice to let me roam a 500,000 square foot mall filled with strangers pretty easy.
“What do you do for your eyebrows? Like, they are MAD cute, yo!”
“My foster mom…she plucks them. WEEKLY. Oh god. It’s so bad. Like, this lady uses ice on my face afterward. And it’s not like I’m even allowed to have boyfriends or anything, so it’s like, ‘why?’ To look pretty for who? GOD. It’s SO annoying!”
“Ha! NO boyfriends? That’s crazy. My mom said the same thing, but I came up with something…Girls.”
“GIIIIRLS?!?!??! LIKE…LESBIANS?!?!?!??!”
“OH GOD! LIKE, DOES THE WHOLE WORLD HAVE TO KNOW? Well, kinda. I had a boyfriend first semester in Canada, and when my dad came to visit, he basically flexed a bicep and was like, ‘mama said knock you out,’ so that was that. I met this girl named Amanda through basketball though, and she was like, 15. She basically forced herself on me in the locker room while we were naked and like, started kissing on me and shit. I don’t know…it felt kinda cool. So we started kicking it until May, and then she like, dumped me? I guess that’s what happens, right?”
“Sooooo, ok. I have like, 100 questions. Did you guys like, DO it?”
“Yeah, we did. She like, broke my cherry with her thumb. Weird as fuck, yo.”
“Ewwww…and like, you?”
“Yeah, I like put my face in her pussy and bit on her button or whatever. It was cool. I’m sorry I’m like, blase about it, but Amanda dumped me for some other really light-skinned black girl. She’s like, weird about black girls or something. So like, I’m caught up out here. I like girls, a lot…and like, I guess I’m supposed to like dudes? It’s weird.”
“Yeeeah, that IS weird. So, I don’t mean to be forward, but pussy. Does it taste like fish? That’s what this dude said at school to me, and I totally don’t believe him. Like, I tasted me…oh god…don’t ask…and I didn’t taste fish. I tasted like, vinegar. Or something.”
“Yeeeeah, it’s vinegar, basically. I guess that’s like, THE taste. Officially…hahahaha. Vinegar.”
“Are you cool with so many questions?”
“Yeah, I am. I mean, I’m the only lesbian I know. Did anybody ever tell you that you look like that girl Cheri from Punky Brewster?
“You mean homegirl that got locked in the freezer?”
“HAHAHAHAHAHA! Yeah, her.”
Diana and I fell in love in the summer of 1997. My foster parents just thought that I had taken an interest in basketball and were glad that their decision that they wanted to home school me hadn’t turned me into a complete anthropophobic mess of a human being. I mean I was, and am, still afraid of most people. But, there was something about Diana that was cool in the sense that she was willing to be patient with me about everything. Like, she’d always joke that “just cause I took you to see Titanic don’t mean that we go together or nothin’…,” but I knew better.
Titanic bled into Men in Black, which became the two of us watching Bound in her basement with the movie-style projector and speaker system. No, we didn’t “go together,” but we were together. Even moreso than watching movies while holding hands and exchanging nervous Eskimo kisses, playing basketball in the backyard was the even more primal exercise for us. Diana taught me how to shoot perfectly. She comically noted that my 20/18 vision was “completely fucking insane,” and that I should be “like the best player, ever. But, mainly, basketball was Diana’s excuse to teach me how to “back her down in the paint.” I’d dribble the ball at the top of the key, and then turn around, and before I could place my ass into her crotch, her right hand was firmly feeling up my rear end.
“Is this even legal?”
“This is STREETBALL, babe. Anything goes! Booty grabs, or say…”
And at that point, invariably, I’d get very pleasurably accosted from behind. Diana would make no pretense out of roughly grabbing my tits, while sinking her teeth into my neck or licking my earlobe. I’d always shake in her arms, and the tingle that would shiver through my pussy was always amazing, and would elicit and deep, guttural moan that was unlike any sound I actually thought I knew how to make.
The kiss came with the sex, though. And the sex, well, the sex absolutely changed my life.
Diana had a bedroom that looked like it belonged to the daughter of a steroid-abusing ex-arm wrestler and current wannabe power-lifter with sports and music industry sponsors. Bobby would come home from a marketing convention with posters galore, and hang them on Diana’s walls in hope that she’d think they were cool. That’s how a Shaq-Fu Da Return album poster, and signed posters of the Wu-Tang Clan, Spice Girls, Blackstreet, and The Fugees ended up on her walls next to growth posters of the Seattle Supersonics’ Gary Payton, the Philadelphia 76ers Allen Iverson, and Lisa Leslie, from the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks.
My first orgasm transpired between what appeared to be some sort of air mattress wedged between a giant mess of over-sized basketball shorts and boxes of expensive Nike sneakers, a sea of Jumpman logos assuring me that opening my legs to this girl was the best idea.
Diana had lured me into said bedroom after what felt like six years — but what was more like six weeks — of poking, prodding, snuggling, cuddling, secret glances and booty pinches. It seemed a torturously long affair, but it wasn’t even an affair at all. Moreso it was foreplay. Initially fun, then insipid, frustrating, and agonizingly inorgasmic. She’d discovered my metaphorical clitoris, and was flicking it off with her metaphorical middle finger. Finally, when she was ready to get down to business, I don’t think I’ve ever been simultaneously more excited and overwhelmed.
She LOVED the Wu-Tang Clan. I can’t say that laying in her bedroom while she rolled marijuana cigarettes to the sound of Raekwon’s voice seemed like an ideal come-on. But, Diana was all I knew and loved about a life I definitely wanted, so I was THERE. The weed was tangential to it all. Diana smoked before sex because Amanda, her first girlfriend, did.
“You smoke, right?”
“Just like, hookah, with my dad, while he listens to jazz. But that’s every so often.”
“Cool. You seem cool enough to have already been doing this, but YOU NEVER KNOW!”
“Yeah, so like, what is this room? This all looks crazy. It’s like, your dad thinks you’re a boy or something?”
“Well, kinda. He thinks I’m a ‘tomboy,’ and I’m gonna let him have that. He gets me all of this shit for free, and is like, ‘I just want you to be cool and happy.’ I mean, I AM happy. Don’t even need all of this shit, but it’s cool, right?”
“Yeah. It’s cool. It’s just a lot. I like how he can’t get you a bed, though! $1,000 worth of sneakers, no bed. A mattress.”
“Smoke this shit slow. I stole it from my dad. It’s the same shit Snoo…”
“OH WOW. My lungs hurt.”
“I told you. Give it a second though. You’re gonna feel really fucked up. I work out, and then I hit this before I go to the mall, so work is ALWAYS chill.”
“Are you fucking serious? THAT’S why you’re always laughing at those bitches?”
“Yeah girl. Kush.”
“Soooo…”
I had already taken off my Daria boxer shorts and kicked my white and green Stan Smith adidas to the floor. We were twinning in these black biker tops we’d picked up from the women’s section at work. She was wearing non-descript athletic thong underwear because she was overdeveloped at 13 and the night janitor at the mall clearly mumbled under his breath “you can bounce a quarter off that ass.” Me, not so much. I had secretly splurged for Victoria’s Secret and a pedicure, so I had lacy black boyshorts on and opaque white French tips on my clear top-coat painted toes. I really thought I was doing my “adult” most in preparation.
We kissed right after we awkwardly cuddled with our backs against her bedroom wall as we sat on her mattress. Our heads were under Sporty Spice’s karate kicking crotch and Post Spice’s “legs akimbo/peace sign” pose, respectively. It wasn’t initially a big deal because we were really fucking high. After we kissed, we couldn’t stop laughing because I thought the closing nose piercing on Diana’s left nostril was a tiny zit that I stared into as if it were the size of her entire nose.
“Wow. That good, huh?”
“No. Ummm…yes…that was cool…but…is that…like…a zi…no…it’s a nose piercing…I’m sorry, I’m being weird.”
Diana had this way of calming me down that is the way I calm down young lesbians whom I am seducing.
She played with my hair and told me I was pretty. It calmed me down immediately. Still works for literally every other doe-eyed neophyte in the world, too.
Then she kissed me what felt like everywhere. The kisses just rained down from every angle conceivable. As the Khia song says, she kissed my neck, my back, my pussy, and my crack. The weed had my mind floating, so I know that I was naked, but the best part of that was not realizing how it’d happened. Thus, it added a level of magic levity to it all. It was as if boy shorts were the Statue of Liberty, and she was David Copperfield. But it all felt amazing.
I was delightfully confused. But then, I suddenly felt not so delightfully physically agitated. My intestines knotted in a manner they had only gnarled prior to me being sick at an Italian restaurant. From there, a clawing sensation began to tear at the tendrils of my spinal column, as if the blood coursing through was being frozen in suspension. This sudden sensation shot through the rest of my vascular being, and I saw the veins in my thin, size five feet pop and stand at attention.
I grabbed at Diana, but not necessarily FOR her. My body wasn’t ready and prepared to accept what was happening. I reached out for Diana because she was the only thing there that felt known, comfortable, and secure. I wrapped my arms around her slightly muscular shoulders, and felt the heat of her sports bra encased 32 C bosom. I bit into her left shoulderblade because it made my head stop spinning. As I felt the three middle fingers of her left hand rubbing along the underside of my clit as they simultaneously slid into my pussy, I came. I came insanely hard. I heard Diana laugh, but then I felt her hold me, and I felt her tears on my right shoulderblade. We stopped right there, and we rocked back and forth. It was tender as hell, but in retrospect, the idea that Wu-Tang’s Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) album closing “Method Man” remix was playing while I had my first orgasm was just weird. As my pot addled brain began to creep forth from its fog, all I heard was…
Hey, enter the square if you dare
Without a flaw, I’m so raw that I’m rare
I’m goin’ to the country, I’m goin’ to the fair
To see the senorita, with flowers in her hair
And get mine, cause she love me long time
Bartender bring more wine
Get in line for the
M-E-T, H-O-D, Man
Here I am, here I am, the Method Man
I remember it like it was yesterday.
I had taken a nap at some point while waiting. I woke up, and it was dark outside. The time on my LED alarm clock radio read 7:41. I freaked, and threw on my Tracy McGrady Toronto Raptors jersey on top of my white sports bra and purple Nickelodeon boxer shorts. I slid on my black Nike sandals and as I prepared to hop off my bed, I knocked my radio on the floor, accidentally turning it on.
“Yes, again, in the news, Bay Area favorite and arm wrestling actor Bobby Johnson, dead, at 46, of a tragic car accident on the Bay Bridge. Also dead, his daughter, Diana, 13.”
My ears cottoned as the rest of the news played out. I slammed my bedroom door shut, and the tears just flowed to the point where it felt like my eyes were drowning. I curled in a ball on my bedroom floor, and laid there, inconsolable.
My foster father woke me in the morning. “Oh god. Marreeeeen. Deeeeannah’s papa! He had zeee, heart attack, they say? Theee steroids. They tired out his heart, and he drove his truck into a dividing wall. He and Deeeanah were dead on impact. So sad. So so sad. Your friend was a beautiful girl. You need me, you need mama, you tell me. I…I leave you alone, my love.”
Didier was always so fucking extra.
As a DJ, there’s a point in my EDM festival sets when I bring the energy way down. Then, I have the kids turn to someone they love, or someone they WANT to love, in the crowd. I tell them to hold hands — and for reasons I can’t ever really bring myself to discuss with them — tell them to tell each other that they love them and that they’ll never let their spirits go.
Then, I drop Elly Jackson’s voice over a plaintive violin:
Been there, done that, messed around
I’m having fun, don’t put me down
I’ll never let you sweep me off my feet
This time, baby, I’ll be…bulletproof
This time, baby, I’ll be…bulletproof
To be simultaneously alive and bulletproof means that your heart has already been pierced by a single bullet.
