In Which Tanning Is Pretty Much Forever

My Phototherapist

by MOLLY YOUNG

The tanning salon was located in one of the malls alongside Highway 101, its logo a stylized pineapple and its exterior the kind described as "tasteful" in Yelp reviews. You had to be eighteen to tan legally, but this rule, judging by the girls at Tamalpais High School, was a flexible one. As with many discomfiting pastimes specific to adolescence (weed, statutory rape), tanning was technically illegal but widely permitted and often abetted by our elders. Certainly it was my favorite activity of the three.

The first time I tanned was with Alice, my best friend. We parked in the Corte Madera parking lot and located the salon easily, since it was tucked right next to the bookstore where we'd often gone with our parents to buy gifts. The change in our patronage from bookstore to salon seemed like a significant upward shift in  maturity, while the legal restrictions on tanning gave us the charge we got when buying Smirnoff with fake IDs.

The waiting area of Pacific Tan was conceptualized as a jungle and it smelled wonderful, like tanning oil. Next to issues of Cosmopolitan lay brochures touting the benefits of Vitamin D, reminding us in their nature of the health-based arguments we lobbed at our parents in favor of Fruit Roll-Ups and Gushers.

The clerk was a kind man who recommended options from the tanning menu and asked me if I was part Chinese. I no longer had frosted highlights at this time but I was still interested in resembling Carmen Electra, so I chose the maximum tan that my skin could handle; Alice was able to go a shade darker thanks to her base tan. The goal was not only a positive one (to roast ourselves) but a negative one (to make our teeth look whiter) and a holistic one (to become hot).

We learned that each private tanning room had a theme––Shangri La for one, Captain Nemo's Nautilus for another--and that a tan included complimentary refreshments and chilled water. Nothing feels more luxurious to a seventeen-year-old than free Mint Milanos still nestled in their paper cups.

Tanning is the most counter-intuitive process imaginable. You strip, put on violet steampunk goggles and lie still in a lit tube, feeling your molecules denature. Ten or twenty minutes pass with a feeling of combined doom and tranquility; it is exactly what I imagine dying to feel like. All the while, the same thing is happening to other women and men lying prone in tubes nearby. On average, more than 1 million Americans visit a tanning salon each day, 70% of whom are Caucasian girls and women aged 16 to 29 years. I'd bet that a good portion of these girls inhabit Marin County.

Back to Pacific Tan. After our machines went off––they were on timers according to how much we paid––we got dressed and ate the fun-size Milky Way bars that had lain atop the folded towels in our tanning rooms. Then, separately (we confirmed this later) we each located the secret cache of candy bars within our rooms and ate a few more. When we emerged from Shangri La and Nemo's Nautilus, I observed that Alice's tan was much deeper than mine, while she maintained that the opposite was true. Naturally.

Examining our crouton-colored fingers we got back in the Corolla and planned the next tanning session. Moments later, speeding down the 101 with vulgar music blasting and sentimental thoughts of lacrosse players in our heads, it all added up to a productive afternoon. We were still operating under the principle that sexual appeal could be bought, provided we bought the right things. This was an exercise in money-wasting and futility, but it also simplified life. What we lacked was strictly material; all we needed to be more successful at parties was what the other girls had. And to a point, this worked. Fake nails and giant hoop earrings actually did make us feel sexier. We just didn't know what to do with the attention once we got it.

Molly Young is the contributing editor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. Her website is here. You can find her recent work on TR here.

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