Photos and Article by: Daiyu Tang ((No AI, photos taken in-world))
It’s been quite a tick dear reader since I wrote about an alternative spirit. This may have had something to do with me shacking up with and then marrying the last one I featured! Anyway, if you like this series you can read about Clivia, Dita, and an anonymous citizen and then see if I’ve managed to keep the theme going for this article.
The purpose of this series was to cover the free spirits, punks and goths in Hathian. Those with styles that aren’t defined by any expectation but their own and where their impact resonates through the changed perceptions they can bring via an alternative outlook. I’d like to think that I’ve matured a little and the catchment is now a little wider, so if you want to be featured, reach out and we’ll get you in the studio for photos and more.
Rochelle
I’d bumped into Rochelle outside that pub in D8; the one where all the construction is currently going on between Hathian proper and the University, as well as the roads out towards Laveau. She’d approached me when I was in a slightly ‘alternative’ style myself and we struck up a conversation that at times had a few moments of probing tension, about boots, tattoos and more. By the end, it felt appropriate to offer Rochelle an interview and some photographs as it appeared to me that as someone relatively new in Hathian she would benefit from the exposure an article could give. Contacts, friends, and more are something I hope that perhaps she can gain, while you gain an insight into her and as you’ll read, some juicy details.
Antwerp, Brooklyn, Hathian
The first surprise was that Rochelle isn’t American. It’s a small surprise, but an important one. Yes, a lot of you aren’t American; Hathian is a melting pot, but sometimes a lack of Americana cultural understanding does mean the shock to the system of being here is greater. So it was with Rochelle.
She told me that she grew up in the countryside around Antwerp and described her former life as relatively sheltered and middle class. About a month before our interview she had arrived in Hathian, but America itself came somewhat earlier.
“Why am I in Hathian?” she repeated when I asked. “Well, coming from a rural place in Antwerp, I came from the countryside… Being new and not a native born American, things tend to take a rocky start, especially when your savings are running low.”
The original motivation was fairly simple, I probed a little, because you know, there’s usually a deeper reason about Hathian than say New Orleans, or New York, or Boston, or any other one of the more… upmarket places.
She told me it was “The American Dream, right? I lived a sheltered life, and moving abroad really spoke to me even as I’m not that young anymore.”
That dream first deposited her on the East Coast. Rochelle later clarified that she had spent time in New York, including Brooklyn, before following a friend south after suitable work proved difficult to find. The friend had apparently sold Hathian to her “like a fairy tale”. That is not the kind of friend I would recommend people make on the internet, or in person and for anyone currently laughing, you can stop. Rochelle (sadly) already knows.
“That turned out to be a bust.”
I guess, I can say… Welcome to Hathian dear.
What Pays Today, What Pays Tomorrow
Rochelle’s current situation is one of those very Hathian arrangements where several different jobs are required to finance the possibility of eventually having just one. If that sounds complex, then pause… reflect. How many of us have worked in this town multiple jobs just so we can study, or save or prove ourselves to take the one bigger job? The FDH member of staff moonlighting as a stripper? The journalist flipping burgers? It happens all the time, because dreams are expensive.
So for Rochelle… She strips. She also produces cam-girl content on the side. Neither is something she seemed particularly interested in disguising. When I asked whether that work was something she genuinely wanted or simply what she had found herself doing because money was disappearing, Rochelle’s answer was considerably less glossy than the photographs accompanying this article.
“Somewhat no,” she admitted. “It’s actually a slippery slope when you hit rock bottom.”
She described stripping as her other job and cam work as the side gig, while being fairly realistic about the chances of becoming wealthy through online adult content. “Only the one top percent earn quite well.” She was also aware that recognition could bring its own problem too. “Once on the internet, always on the internet, right?”
That is worth remembering before reducing somebody to whatever photograph of them happens to be easiest to find and dear reader, that is important, because the thing Rochelle is actually trying to build toward has considerably less to do with poles, cameras or subscriber counts and might one day, in the future, save your life.
“I’m trying to, between shifts if it allows me to… follow a course to become a nurse in Hathian,” she told me. “It’s quite difficult to combine multiple jobs, study… and then juggle between it to get everything paid for.”
I know that Hathian is very efficient at deciding what somebody is according to whichever job they took when rent was due. It tends to pay rather less attention to what they’re attempting to become between those shifts and so while Rochelle may be found working at the Titty Twister (‘TT’) today, that does not mean TT is necessarily the end of the story.
Inked Up
Then there are the tattoos. You’ll have seen that Rochelle has a lot of them. They’re all over her skin and I think it might be fair to write that Rochelle now appears to have approached the concept of exposed skin as an unfinished inking task, I therefore assumed the ink would be the easy part of the interview.
It wasn’t.
That revelation rather changed how I looked at the photographs we’d just taken considering the fact she had not been in the US for that long.
Rochelle linked the beginning of the transformation to her time in New York and a period in which drugs and bad company increasingly became part of her life. “I first got addicted to weed… the softer kind of drugs, but it eventually ended up with the harder kind like speeds, coke… amphetamines.”
She described one particularly unhealthy friendship with somebody willing to exchange drugs for access to her, before eventually developing what Rochelle described as an interest in tattooing people in similarly compromised circumstances. There is more in that history than I’m going to turn into spectacle here but suffice to say that evil calls everywhere, not just Hathian.
Yet she did not speak about herself as someone who needed to be rescued, or who was looking for sympathy. “What drives me… I always was ambitious and a go-getter,” she said. “Even in this situation I try to make the best of the cards that are being thrown in my direction.”
Perhaps that is the better way to look at the ink now and perhaps dear reader, however it started, the body wearing it today belongs to Rochelle.
Where to Find Her
“What do I want to tell…” Rochelle considered when I asked why readers should actually meet her. It took her a little, but her first answer was admirably practical when it came out.
“They can meet me at the local strip club in Hathian… It’s not always they can see a wannabe pornstar covered in tattoos top to bottom twirling around a pole.”
So yes, those looking for the more adult side of Hathian can start at TT. Rochelle is working there, she isn’t remotely embarrassed about it, and judging by the photographs accompanying this article she understands perfectly well what she’s selling.
But there are other ways into the conversation. Ways that I as your ‘balanced’ editor would also suggest… Ask about Belgium. Ask what brought her from Brooklyn to Louisiana. Ask about the tattoos. Ask whether nursing is still the plan and how the course is going…
Hathian newcomers have an unfortunate tendency either to disappear quickly or become completely entangled in the city before anybody remembers what they looked like when they arrived. Rochelle is currently somewhere in the interesting bit between those two outcomes: working, studying, flirting, surviving and still trying to decide what shape the next part takes.
Oh and reader? At the end of the interview she told me, without supplying any useful context whatsoever:
“First one is free on the house.”
As responsible journalism traditionally requires some understanding of what is being offered before endorsing it, I have elected not to investigate further.
If interested in being featured in our series, please reach out to our Editor: Daiyu Sanko-Tang
