#90: It Stuck With Me – No. 06
A vignette titled ‘Wiggle’s’ – autobiographical piece capturing the moments from my life that remain etched in my memory
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[Image description: Text ‘It Stuck With Me No. 06’ on a lilac background]
Wiggle’s
It’s the summer of 2007 and I’ve just finished school forever. Exams done, exercise books packed away, the adult world just on the horizon. Most of my friends will be starting university in the Autumn. I’ve deferred my place for a year, but I haven’t made any major plans yet. I just know I want to get out of my hometown. So it’s a strange, weightless in-between time.
I’m down on the south coast visiting a couple of guy friends, boys I’d met at Christian Summer camp some years before. We’d kept in touch via MSN Messenger, but also wrote letters back and forth, and then reunited each summer at camp.
One of them has just turned eighteen, and so a celebratory night out is in order. We hit the town in Bournemouth. Me and eight (!) lads. I wasn’t sure what to make of the ratio, but I was flattered to be included. I liked being the girl who could hang.
Before we head to the town centre, we run into the nearest off-licence for a last-minute top-up. The boys grab the cheapest lager and bottles of WKD. We drink as we wander down towards the seafront. Someone suggests the pier, someone else wants chips. Most of us get a cone of chips. We lean over the railings, flicking scraps and watching the seagulls swoop down and snaffle them up.
By the time we hit the bars in town, we’re already tipsy. The boys are in full show-off mode, arm-wrestling on sticky tabletops and shouting over each other about football teams I don’t care about. One of them teaches me a silly secret handshake that we repeat every time we pass each other.
Our final stop is Wiggle Gentleman’s Club. I’m surprised when the bouncer waves me in without asking for an entry fee. Apparently, women get in free. I breeze past the velvet rope, pretending I do this sort of thing all the time.
The narrow hallway is lit with that pinky-red glow reminiscent of the film Moulin Rouge that we were all obsessed with.
I’d imagined a strip club so many times before thanks to a steady diet of late-nineties and early-noughties music videos: ‘The Next Episode’ by Dr Dre ft. Snoop Dogg, the Pussycat Dolls’ ‘Buttons,’ Britney’s new hit ‘Gimme More’…
The visual vocabulary of those videos had already seeped deep into my teenage psyche; slow-motion hair flicks, paper money swirling through the air, bodies luminous bathed in the studio lights.
As we walk down the corridor, a private montage flickers through my mind; those slick, hyper-stylised worlds where alluring women gyrate on poles and chairs.
To read the remainder of this essay beyond the paywall, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid subscription.
Previous posts in the ‘It Stuck With Me’ series:
I revisit a relationship I first wrote about in a piece for British Vogue in 2020. At 24, I met a 50-year-old divorced man at a literary event and a year later began a sporadic sexual relationship with him. Partially paywalled. To read in full, upgrade to paid:
I wrote about an age-inappropriate flirtation-of-sorts I had when I had an after-school job as a teen. His attention is addictive, especially when compared to how the boys my own age ignored me.:
In this vignette, ‘The Mooning’, I’m at a sleepover party at my friend’s 10th birthday. Her parents run a pub, so they live in the flat above. As usual, all of us girls are up to mischief. Partially paywalled. To read in full, upgrade to paid:
In this vignette, ‘A Single Playing Card’, I’m nine or 10 years old and together, my primary school pals and I find a playing card in the dirt. It’s pornographic and we are stunned. Partially paywalled. To read in full, upgrade to paid:
In the vignette, ‘School Disco’, it’s the summer of 1997 and I’m having the best time dancing to Hanson’s ‘MmmBop’, the Grease MegaMix and T-Spoon’s ‘Sex on the Beach’ (inappropriate!):
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I’m Almaz Ohene, a Creative Copywriter, Freelance Journalist and Accidental Sexpert.
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