slip back into being a courted girl who prided herself on using honesty as a method of flirtation. “I have.” I gave a heavy sigh as if love’s ravages wearied me, and then I looked up from my beer with a knowing smirk.
I’d met my guitar-playing boyfriend my freshmen year, and he’d been my first real lover, the first person with whom I both figuratively and literally slept on any kind of regular basis. It wasn’t long before we were practically symbiotic, informing each other’s speech patterns and thesis sentences and food choices, growing what appears now in the few photos that exist to be a single mop of unruly hair and engaging in passionate deconstruction of our every utterance, especially on the subjects of power, gender, genius, sex. Although we’d had a rocky road the last couple months of school, under the pressure of his graduating and the future’s uncertainty, he was coming to Philadelphia in a couple weeks to live for the summer because I was there, a fact that was dissolving in my mind like a sugar cube dropped into beer. I let my answer stand unelaborated upon, an implied past tense. Walking back to West Philly in a haze of Colt 45 and chemistry, I was already gone. I had gnawed off that important relationship and left it behind in the bar as if it were a limb in the maws of a trap.
CARL AND I didn’t sleep together that night or the next night. I don’t remember how many days later it was that I made my way to his room. I don’t remember his invitation, or how I got there, or if I had officially broken up with my boyfriend yet or not. But I can almost smell the chemical firing from my brain being blown. He lived on the third floor in what had once been a kitchen. Against one wall remained a sink and some cheap cabinets, and against another a few plastic milk crates held albums. A mannequin wearing a gas mask stood guard in one corner. There was no other furniture. We sat on opposite sides of the mattress on the floor for a brief, loaded exchange of sentences, and then he crawled toward me slowly, his large face coming first, pointy-chinned like a cat, thick lips protruding. It was the last moment of calm.
He was less like Marlon Brando in bed and more like the Transexual Transvestite from Transylvania. He was hypermasculine and campily feminine. He was huge and graceful and sure and louche. He had swiveling hips and a massive finger span and no shame. He was not afraid of any part of me and not afraid of hurting me or displeasing me. He was greedy, but also baldly fascinated by my avidity and receptivity. The strokes of his dick unloosed in me every pornographic cliché I’d imbibed in my near decade-long exploration of smut prose: I’m impaled, I thought ecstatically. He’s in me up to my throat! As each worn phrase exploded through my consciousness I felt like I was meeting truth, being made real. When he came I clutched at what I thought was the end before discovering his first orgasm was like my own, less a satisfaction than an antagonism, just a vista on the way to the top of the mountain—grandeur, yes, ahhhh, have a drink—but then back to got-to-get-there, got-to-get there, higher, more. It was a sweltering night and the sheet soon pulled off and the texture of the worn mattress was pilly and disgusting. Our fingernails filled with the black of each other’s dead skin. Sweat slicked our bodies. Even hours into it, his penis thwacked back toward his stomach when I let it go. His moves had been impressive, but then we went to a place beyond moves. We were not so much communing as erupting.
At one point, we lay apart, backs propped against the wall, legs splayed, touching just at our hooked ankles, both twitching, in a fevered trance. I was brought back to myself by the arrhythmic shaking of the mattress; I saw he was jerking himself off, the streetlight coming in and laying blue on our bodies. I watched him. So this is what we were going to do now, I thought. I touched myself too, but my fingers didn’t feel good in the raw folds, and he was oblivious to me. Without his interest I became confused. I took a breath and rolled toward him, straddled high on his thigh and moved my mouth towards his head.
“I don’t know what you want me to do,” I whispered. Our skin was sticky, and it hurt as it pulled at each shift of weight. “Tell me what you want me to do.” I had never said this to anyone before.
Carl returned back to the room. He smiled at me with surprise, a condescending kindness. He didn’t tell me anything, but he kissed me deeply. He put his hands on my hip bones and pressed while he set me back, which made me feel tiny and invincible. My blood rose again.
We had sex until my body was battered. Until my pussy was so swollen the only thing to make it feel better was to get it wet all over again, until a single finger in me felt as huge as a giant cock, until uncertainty was obliterated. He staggered off to work the next morning after a single hour of sleep. After a few more, I wobbled down to see Reba at work.
“I thought you two might get together,” she said to me calmly, perhaps even coolly. She coaxed a ball of ice cream from the vat and then glided down the counter to give the customer their cone and take their money.
There might have been a recent history of perceived betrayals that each of us was retaliating against that summer, the confused pain of separation that is part of youth and love and growth. Was she leaving me behind as she became more big-city punk rock? Was I snubbing her in favor of snooty college intellectuals? Maybe a little of both. We were both horny girls who had a fierce attachment that we’d never explored physically. Between Reba’s sexual enlightenment and my own and our need to differentiate, the main times she and I talked privately during that fervid June and July were the few occasions when she got off work early and, having an hour to kill before Cantanine came to get her, accompanied me to the Bounce Babe Lounge.
There was no cover, no doorman. No one batted an eye when we walked in, underage and in ratty clothes cadged from laundry left too long in communal dryers. Most days, I sat alone at the far end of the bar, watched the girls dance on the tiny stage behind it. There were just a few on shift at a time. I had started coming at the invitation of Maerene, a young Irish expat who squatted in West Philly and hung out on the porch of the anarcho house. She wore wigs over her shaved head, bobby socks with her stilettos, and a kimono in between sets. She was gently pear-shaped, and her long limbs had little discernable muscle tone—the exact opposite of the other woman I recall easily, a petite heroin addict from outside the anarcho-punk clan who had breasts like pesticide-plumped red apples and the taut musculature of a gymnast wrapped in waxy, bruised skin. She was fine-featured and wore her hair in a tight ponytail. Her boyfriend famously let her dance as long as she kept her bra on, but some afternoons she’d show up desperate, begging to be let on the shift, and she’d strip down to pasties for the bigger tips while nervously keeping an eye on the door. The girls chose songs from the jukebox when it was their turn on the stage—mostly Top 40, hard rock, and funk. They danced each in her own style, and they were good. I liked to watch them.
I watched the way Maerene and the other new girls, all of whom were my new housemates and neighbors, adopted the stripper moves and then made them their own, the Americans adding touches whose provenance I recognized from childhood dance classes and MTV music videos. I watched the heroin addict execute pro stripper moves like a machine, kicking up the pole into an upside-down straddle, bending at the waist, ass towards audience, jiggling her butt cheeks so they slapped together rhythmically (I was astounded that such firm butt cheeks could do that). She rotated vigorously through half a dozen of these operations with no worry about adding flow in between them. On the other side was loungey Maerene, who was nothing but flow. I watched her strut on the eight-foot-long platform and twirl languorously, letting a gauzy scarf slip off her shoulders, slinking her arms free of her bra straps so that the soft cups flapped below her budded breasts like an unhooked garter belt. She never broke a sweat.
Neither did I, surprisingly enough for a young women’s studies minor who just a month or two earlier had penned a writ-in-blood paper about the pernicious effect of sexed-up photos of women in Rolling Stone, and who had lacerated her boyfriend for the small collection of ass shots he’d clipped from old copies of Penthouse. I boiled with feminist rage that year; it pounded in my blood like fists against a wall. When my boyfriend sat on my dorm room bed with his guitar and sang an angry song he had written about me—or was it about another girl? It hardly mattered; my reaction was the same when it was my turn—my vision of kicking the instrument to smithereens was so intense I blinked when he finished, as if emerging from a darkened theater, surprised to find