This past Christmas I took a trip down memory lane. My present to myself this year was a book that I had been coveting for many years. It has been out of print for decades and is fairly obscure. Here and there I would hunt for it at bookstores and never find it. Several years ago I continued my search on the Internet. Copies of it were surfacing on ebay and sites of other used booksellers with some regularity. It was amazing how high the asking prices were. Years passed and I still didn't buy it.
I've scored numerous other books on the Internet and usually my "treasures" cost me less than $15 including shipping and handling. Often less than $10 if I'm shopping on ebay. Usually they are books that have touched me somehow in the past when I read them in paperback, so I buy them in hardbound editions since I plan on keeping them forever.
Anyways, this one particular book, a biography, bedeviled me for years since it was so expensive. Did I really want it that badly?- I would ask myself. After all, it did cost more than my car payment.
Several days before Christmas it showed up on ebay yet again. This time I bought it. Below are the e-mails I exchanged with the seller after my winning bid.

The seller wrote:
> I sent an invoice through ebay 417.00 shipping and
> insurance included. I will ship within 24 hours of
> receiving payment. I do have one question if you
> don't mind. I bought this book from Walton's book
> store in Independence, MO. when it was new. I've
> ridden Harley's my whole life and am interested in
> story's and related items. Somehow this book seemed
> to stay with me through the years. I been trying to
> thin out allot of years of accumulation. I sell a
> little bit on ebay not allot and that is why I
> normally start my auctions at around 10 dollars.
> It's not worth it to me to box and ship one item for
> a couple of dollars. This has blown me away. I
> figured someone would buy it just to read. I had no
> ideal it would bring this much. Are you able to tell me why all the interest in this book? Thanks. (name withheld)

Date: Sun, 22 Dec 2002 22:15:53 -0800 (PST)
From: "tanya danielle"  | This is Spam | Add to Address Book
Subject: Re: A WAYWARD ANGEL. Item 2900510265
To: (name withheld)


Hi (name withheld)! My interest in this book is kind of odd. I
grew up in a conservative town in Northern California.
My older half-brother was always considered a
troublemaker and began hanging out with some (name of members of a motorcycle club) as a teenager. My mother told me that they were
all the scum of the earth. Of course the first thing I
did was go to the local library and look up ("name of the motorcycle club") in the card catalog. "A Wayward Angel" was the only match so I started reading it when I was about 8
years old. My mother took it away from me before I
finished, but it had a profound impact on me
nonetheless. Last year my friend took me to a
cemetery in a bad section of LA for my birthday. I
asked to go there because I'd been near it, but never
in it and inexplicably it called to me. I came across
a tombstone for George Wethern. It wasn't the same
George Wethern as (the main character) in the book, I don't think, but the
coincidence spooked me and made me realize that
there's some reason that I need to read the book
again. I've thought about it often in the last several decades, but I need to read it again to know why it has
some meaning for me.
When I started searching for it last year I thought
I'd be lucky to find a trace of it. I'm sure you can
imagine my shock when I found one copy available on
amazon.com for... $500. Over the past year I've
sporadically seen copies on ebay, amazon.com, and
other sources going for $400- $500. There are 2 copies
on Amazon.com available right now. Evidently the book
hold a great deal of appeal for some people, but I'm
not sure why. I'm also not sure why I'm haunted by it
either.
You had the number 81 in parentheses after your
seller name on ebay. I don't know if that's
coincidence as well, but I think that number has some
significance to (the motorcycle club) as well. Everything came
together this afternoon when I saw your listing on
ebay and it all prompted me to finally try to get a
hold of this book and understand why I need to read
it.
This is probably more than you wanted to know, but I
found myself trying to explain my interest to myself,
as well as to you, once I began typing. Happy
Holidays! Tanya

So finally I have a copy of the book that has lingered in my mind for so many years. I've only read about half of it in the past month because I've found that it takes me awhile to take in what I'm reading. Every chapter provokes so many thoughts because I was 8 years old when I last read it. The book describes the life of a violent criminal in blunt, brutal detail. I can picture the rooms of my childhood home where I sat reading this book as a young girl. I remember how much the book upset me, but how I felt strangely compelled to keep on reading it. Somehow it seemed very necessary to read it and absorb it. There was something I needed to understand. Now I think I know what it was.
When I first checked that book out of the Menlo Park Library in Northern California I had almost no experience of anything outside of my conservative family and the school system in that very conservative, uptight area. When any of the adults I knew spoke of their children they spoke of which the best schools were and in terms of how their children could be successful. In addition to the emphasis on shools and grades, the parents encouraged, or forced, their kids to pursue sports and other extracurricular activities so their kids would be admitted to private college-preparatory highschools. The emphasis from a young age was on a "well-rounded" student. That's what the "good" schools were looking for. Almost no one that I knew, including myself, ended up at a public highschool. That's in spite of the fact that the public highschools were very strong academically in that area. The private school parents believed that they were providing their kids with the best chance at being admitted to a prestigious four-year university by paying $10,000 a year for them to attend a prestigious highschool. They also wanted their kids to interact with kids from other well-heeled families and to stay away from the "middle-class" ones in public schools.
When I started reading "A Wayward Angel" I was 8 and my parents were trying to groom me to succeed academically and fit in with the other kids at school. I was doing well at the former because I was such a bookworm, but failing abysmally at the latter because I was a dork. I was painfully shy, horrible at sports, and always had geeky, out-of-date clothes because I could never figure out what was "cool." "A Wayward Angel" was about people who did not care about conventional standards. They did not care at all. Not even a bit. For the first time I glimpsed a world outside of the snobbish neighborhood where I lived. It was a revelation to me that not everyone on the planet measured success by the school you attended and how rich your friends were.
The people documented in the book were far from upstanding citizens, most were criminals. Even at my young age then I knew that I would not seek a life of crime. I did not admire the people in the book, I just realized that I wanted to be away from the phoniness and pretentious values that I was surrounded by. My young world expanded by reading that book because I became fascinated by a culture of people who flaunted their disdain for conservative society. It gave me hope that I was not the only one who did not want to be programmed to "succeed" on the academic fast-track.
Let me say here that anyone else would be extremely hard-pressed to find any inspiration in this book. Its contents are very dark and graphic. It was simply that it was the first thing that I read that really jolted me into an awareness of life outside my circumscribed existence, and it prompted me to question a lot of what I was seeing in the behavior of my elders.
Even before that book I used to fear that I would someday grow up to be like many of the adults around me. Would I someday find myself with other adults comparing my new material possessions with theirs? Or comparing my children with theirs? Would the thrust of most of my conversation just be a subtle form of one-upsmanship? Would I seek to befriend people who could help me climb socially? And what would I be climbing for? What was the pinnacle anyways? I knew it must be sad to live like that: I saw it every day.
Reading this book as an adult brings back a flood of feelings I had as a young girl. It reminds me of how intense the pressure was to conform to everybody else's ideals. It was good that I decided to think for myself and search for what I wanted. An academic education is extremely valuable and material possessions can be fun, but there are a lot of fascinating people who have neither. I'm so glad that I expanded my world beyond the neighborhood and the prevailing attitudes of where I grew up.

Hello-
Here and there I receive e-mails asking what new magazines and videos that I'm currently in so I thought I'd list some of them here.
- VCA just released Jim Holliday's "Another Blonde Moment" on DVD and VHS. Jim is one of my favorite people to work for. His sets are ALWAYS full of a ton of beautiful girls, (check out the box cover of "Another Blonde Moment"!), and are a great deal of fun as well.
- I have an interview with a bunch of photos in the Feb. Club Confidential
- there's a "Centerfold of the Year " contest in the Feb. Busty Beauties and I'm one of the contenders. Please vote for me if you have a moment!
- Here's a funny one: I received my Jan. 20 issue of Newsweek and was thumbing through it when I saw my picture in an article about porno and computer technology.

Last week I posted the first of what will be my weekly "journal" entries on this site. Thank you so much to those of you who e-mailed me words of encouragement on expressing my thoughts. I was very timid, and still am, about putting my words up for view because it seemed somewhat self-indulgent to think that anyone would want to read any of it. However, I decided that no one's forced to read these musings if they don't feel like it, so it doesn't really matter if they are up here or not. Writing has always been very therapeutic for me as it sates some unexplainable need I have to organize my thoughts and vent my emotions. I wrote the following over the past few days as I have been dancing a lot lately and the subject has been on my mind.

Quite often strippers encounter customers in the clubs who are needlessly rude and adversarial. Of course most men who come to watch the dancers are polite and respectful, but there is certainly a portion of them who can be dickheads. Over the years that I've danced I have often wondered at the source of their animosity.
To some extent dancers need to be comfortable with their sexuality and also have confidence in their appearance. If they don't have those qualities they will not be able to step up on stage half-naked and dance more than a few times, let alone make a living at it. Perhaps some of the customers are threatened by attractive, sexually expressive women and are further resentful of the fact that they have to pay to see them nude or semi-nude. That particular set of customers needs to regroup their thoughts about both strippers and women in general.
Every woman is entitled to feel sexy. She is not a "bitch" or "stuck-up" if she feels attractive and enjoys male attention. She is not a "whore" or a "slut" if she behaves provocatively in the appropriate environment. A strip club is the appropriate environment. Customers walk in the door of an adult establishment because they want to give shape to a sexual fantasy. Exotic dancing can be extremely erotic and beautiful. When customers come into the clubs and insult the women working there they expose themselves as the bitter, unhappy people that they are. It's not just that they dislike strippers either. (If that was the case why would they be in there paying a cover charge and buying overpriced drinks?) Their hatefulness reflects their attitude towards women in general. Some people just don't want women to enjoy their sexuality and have confidence in their physicality.
Something many strippers have heard at work is:

"You're not that hot. You do nothing for me."

Customers making comments such as that are merely trying to shake the confidence of the woman to whom they are speaking, and there's no need for that. Not every dancer appeals to every customer and that is fine. Nobody is universally attractive, but no one needs to be insulted unnecessarily either.
Another oft-heard line in clubs is:

"What's SHE doing up there dancing?? Yuck!"

Every woman, regardless of her weight, ethnicity, age, or any other factor should relish her own sexuality. Maybe she does not strike the fancy of some patrons, but there are probably others who enjoy her performance. There is no one "type" who suits everybody.
The crux of this whole matter is that many people try to punish women verbally for enjoying or displaying the erotic part of their beings. I can't count the number of times that I have been called such things as "stupid bimbo" or "dumb bitch" at work. On more than a few occasions I have been informed that: "it's a good thing you can dance because there's probably nothing else that you could do."
Inevitably these words come from people who have barely bothered to speak to me and who will never know me. I don't take their comments personally because they stem from a hatred towards women in general. A strip club is a place where customers can come and openly marvel at the beauty of women. Strippers can provide an enticing, beautiful performance for someone who enjoys viewing the sexual nature of a woman. Those people who do not like that type of entertainment should simply not come in.

Hello and welcome to all!

I've had this site since 2000 and have long planned to develop a member's area. Within the next few months it should be up and running. This is the first of weekly "journal" entries which I will begin posting on the site. I enjoy writing but have no idea if anyone wants to read any of my musings.

It is Christmas Day 2002 as I write this. (You will be reading this several weeks later.) A few weeks ago at my gym a young man named Jimmy came in. No one had seen him in the better part of a year. He is about 18 and had begun coming to the gym when he was about 14 or 15. Since he was a local kid some of the members knew him. It was quite evident that he came from a troubled background. The owners of the gym allowed him to take martial arts classes and use the facilities in exchange for his doing some cleanup work around the place. They also told him he could sleep upstairs in the offices if he needed to.

No one seemed to know what had become of Jimmy's parents. He lived with two older brothers in a rough section of town. One brother was about 3 years older than Jimmy, and the other may have been about 5 years older. Both were drug users and had been in and out of jail for a series of petty offenses. Of course neither was equipped to be raising a young brother, and presumably, they had not received much in the way of parenting themselves. They seemed to care for Jimmy and tried to help him out as best they could, but Jimmy was already experimenting with drugs and doing poorly in school.

One of the martial arts instructors had taken a particular interest in helping him, but Jimmy started taking classes less and less frequently. When he was about 16 he started using speed. An older sister who lived in Arizona found out, came to Los Angeles and brought him to live with her in a better environment. For whatever reason that did not last long and Jimmy returned to L.A., but barely came to the gym at all anymore.

About a year and a half passed and someone from the gym was out jogging and saw Jimmy in front of a house in her neighborhood. He was sitting by himself wearing a T-shirt with the gym's name on it. She said hello, gave him a hug and told him to stop by the gym again. He was clearly under the effects of some heavy drugs. The sweetness in his personality was still there, but he communicated as if his conscious self was a great distance away. He promised to stop by and say hello to everyone. Armando, one of the martial arts instructors, heard the story and went to the same neighborhood over the next few days trying to find him but had no luck.

Others who knew Jimmy wondered where he was, but at the same time they almost feared to know. Almost a year went by and no one saw him again until a few weeks ago. He walked into the gym out of the blue looking upbeat. His demeanor was far different than it had been in the recent times that anyone had seen him. He had a clear look in his eye and told everyone that he had enlisted in the Army. He had just completed a six-week stint at one of the Army camps and was heading back for more training after Christmas. It was beautiful to see him excited and happy and having a positive direction in life.

Today, on Christmas, I think of him and hope that he will keep his life on a promising course and find happiness. No child should ever be abandoned by his parents and left to find his own way without adult guidance. There was probably more that a lot of us at the gym could have done to help, but maybe, like me, no one knew how far they should intercede in Jimmy's life. As I think about that today I still am not sure what the answer is.