to see. Flyers for protests and political meetings and punk shoes were tacked on a bulletin board and layered on the refrigerator. Surfaces were crowded with stacks of paperbacks, cassette tapes with handmade covers, jelly jars filled with spices, dirty dishes, and canisters of bulk grains and legumes. And there was so much to smell. The parlor of the house acted as a bike room and erstwhile repair shop, and the stink of grease and tires permeated the whole first floor, laid just beneath the sweetening bananas in the hand-thrown bowl on the table, last night’s curry, this morning’s coffee, and the aroma of a warmed stovetop that was crusted and buckled like asphalt. I’d been in punk pads before—in Pittsburgh, in Philly, in State College—but this house was far richer, steeped deep in every countercultural trend of the last thirty years until it smelled of them all.
And the people! A constant flow in and out, they emanated exotic oils and their own B.O., and they were beautiful to me. Hair dread-locked or Manic Panicked or shaved off, clothes ripped and rejiggered and worn with élan, and among the male residents were a few who were men to my eyes, so clearly different from the student boys with whom I’d been cavorting—towering over them, for one, was there something in the bananas?—that it was hard to believe they shared a Y chromosome. At Oberlin, a school then known for the lax hygiene of its crunchy granolas, I was still on the grungy side of average, but here, I felt squeaky clean, a square, a completely uninteresting summering college student who could not possibly register on anyone’s radar.
On anyone’s radar, that is, except those looking for a potential sex partner. Which, okay, was the status of a not insignificant number. So while “the real me” felt invisible, another me felt on display, on the shelf at a market. And, to be fair, I had put myself there. If my advocate at this house had abandoned me, I was going to need another one, because, hey, this was where I wanted to be—absolutely, without a doubt. And while my belief that gaining the sexual interest of the right person was the shortest route to belonging might have been complicated by my declaration of a women’s studies minor earlier that year, it had not been supplanted. Especially when my best friend was busy fucking someone else and the guys were this hot.
“I’m Reba’s friend,” I’d offer when acknowledged. “I’m going to be renting Secil’s room.” I was alone, out on plank dangling over something new and unknown. I found I liked the feeling.
Which was good. Because did Reba and Catanine never have to pee? Did they never have to eat?
“I’m still waiting for Reba to come down,” I said to one of the very tall men the second time he came through the kitchen and raised his heavy eyebrows at me.
“She’s leaving you sitting here a long time.” His eyes traveled down and up before locking on mine. I felt condescended to, and shamed, and seen. My nipples and clitoris buzzed.
“Yep.”
“I’m going into Center City to check out a festival later. If she isn’t down by then, you can come if you want.”
Here we go here we go here we go, I thought. But I tried to act blasé.
CARL LOOKED LIKE a young Marlon Brando, stretched thinner but with shoulders as wide in his black leather jacket and a temperament as broody, and he was worldly wise at the ripe old age of twenty-four to my just-turned twenty, taller than I was by almost a foot. Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back had been released a couple months previous, and Chuck D’s insistence and the steady squeal of “Don’t Believe the Hype” unfurled from cars into the street that afternoon as it would the whole hot summer, rattling mufflers and internal organs before receding again from the ears of pedestrians, the thump-thump-thump the last to be heard, the lyrics still ringing in my head—“but some they never had it”—until another pair of chromed hubcaps would appear and externalize the track again. It was a long walk to the festival, which had something to do with Africa, or Black Pride, and when we got there the scent of sandalwood incense was heavy in the air.
When we’d exhausted what the fair had to offer us—spectacle, mostly, the feeling of being other together—we went to a bar where we drank round after round of Colt 45, which Carl paid for. I ran out of my Camel Lights and switched to his Reds. Somewhere along the way he dropped his cool and became chatty, explaining the mechanics of the house to me in all their gossipy glory. He laid out the tension between the more dedicated political anarchists and the anarchically libertine, told me the histories of recent residents and their replacements, detailed whose yearnings for whom had been kindled, returned, rebuffed in storylines involving twists of sexual orientation and both principled and not-quite-so non-monogamy. I raked it all in as if I were studying for a high-stakes final while I gulped my beer and batted my eyes at him.
“Are you an anarchist?” he asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said. Anarchism wasn’t en vogue at Oberlin. I could tell that the house members who were part of Wooden Shoe bookstore collective didn’t have too much to do with the circled A of the Sex Pistols, but that was about it. “Are you?”
He paused thoughtfully. “I’m a Situationist.”
“What’s that?”
“You never read Guy Debord at that fancy college?” We’d already established that he knew about Oberlin. A woman on the scene, an elegant junkie from money who’d never stopped slumming, had gone there, too, for a while.
“No.”
“I’ll loan it to you. After you read it, then we’ll talk. Are you a feminist?”
“Yes.”
He gave a rueful grin. I congratulated myself on the right answer, true and sexy.
IT’S AMAZING HOW FAST identities shift and gel at that tender age. Six months earlier, Reba had been renting a room from a yuppie graphic designer in Center City. I had come to visit over winter term to intern at the feminist paper, and we’d tiptoed around the city she was still finding her way in, trying to slip into cool clubs or bars, then standing at the edges of them. It’d only been a year since I’d simultaneously discovered vibrators and Kathy Acker, two things that seemed absolutely essential to my notion of myself as I sat twisting next to Carl on the barstool that day.
Reba had sent the vibrator to me in New Mexico, where I was spending the summer. It was a huge, Caucasian penis model powered by D batteries that she’d picked up at a corner porno store. Acker’s novel Don Quixote I had special ordered at a Santa Fe bookshop, a waitressing job finally providing me with the money to pay for it after I’d been carrying around a review of it for months. I expected the book to be a revelation, and it was. Reading it, I felt discovery and recognition even when I couldn’t understand what Acker was saying. Unfamiliar with the original Don Quixote, I couldn’t use it as a template, but Acker’s protagonist was made a knight by receiving an abortion, I understood that much. I sensed some truth about armor and pure resolve arising from violence and shame, and the way this inevitably led to sexing with multitudes, with people of every age and gender variation and also dogs. YES! I wrote in the margin. The book’s exuberance and lack of plot stimulated and exhausted me and often sent me back to bed, where I’d probably just come from anyway, since I spent a lot of time there with the vibrator. Sometimes I combined activities, and used the vibrator while reading. Each orgasm grew up from my toes.
I TROTTED OUT Acker’s name now, the coolest one I knew. Carl hadn’t read her, but he knew of her, he approved. He’d heard she was a Burroughs disciple.
“No she wasn’t! That’s not true!” I cried out. I had no idea, really, but I couldn’t allow the fierce knight Kathy Acker to be slotted as the little sister of the guy who’d shot his wife in the head. Burroughs’s punk godfather status and his renowned act of misogyny created the kind of uncomfortable dissonance in my head that make me argue with any boy listening. But at that point in the day, in the drinking, in the opening bars of our relationship, my stridency floated right past Carl.
“Have you ever been in love, Zoe?” His chin was on his fist, his eyelids at half-mast, his eyes on mine but slightly unfocused.
“Yes,” I said, relieved