He-she made a moue of disgust and said breathily, “They have such rough, insensitive hands.”
“They might tear her bodice!”
“And her falsies would land in her lap!”
“Ooh!” cried the stung queen.
“Don't mind Stella,” I called from the booth where I was taking a quick pee. “She's got her period.”
“She's going through menopause.”
“You always pause for men,” Stella crowed, getting her revenge. But her adversary was not quashed.
“You mean, mean thing, you know I'm a true-blue lesbian,” lisped he-she. “Noh will be my character witness.”
“Look, the only kind of character I want to witness is the loss of a good one. Lily Law just told me the only kind of sex I know how to have is hetero-oppressive, regardless of the gender of the party of the second part.”
“Is a party of the second part anything like a stand-in?”
“Standing makes it too hard to get in.”
When I waved goodbye they didn't acknowledge me. Stella had confiscated his lipstick, announcing, “That color doesn't do a thing for you.
Dead
people should wear
black
.” They probably got left too often for them to pay it any mind. They didn't need anybody else anyway. Their friendship was based on an agreement to be each other's perpetual floating audience. The bitchiness was partly just their way of trying to be glamorous and vivacious. And no matter how cruel they were to each other, the audience outside their charmed circle was not nearly as nice. I've seen (and made) worse arrangements.
When I came back, that devil Lefty had moved over and had the newcomer tucked in at our table. Black Hawk was just getting ready to sit down, and the trespassing jane couldn't get her eyes full of those six feet of hard black hustle-muscle. Lefty was winking and grinning at me, lit up like a pinball machine. I couldn't leave. It would have made too good a story.
“Big Bird, good buddy,” I said. “You're going to hurt yourself tryin' to carry off something this big. Isn't that a little lambie-poo over there, glaring at you? Just dying for you to come a little closer so she can claw your eyes out?”
B.H. hovered for a second, but the jane was looking at her fingernails, too dumb to appreciate having a couple of self-employed studs jousting for her. She did not indicate a preference for either of us. Still, she was seated at
my
table.
“What do you want, Black Hawk?” I said under my breath. “She's hopeless.”
“Must be your kid sister.” And she took off, actually left the bar in a huff, dragging her septic girlfriend Cookie (guess what kind) with her.
So I sat down, relieved I hadn't had to dust off my knuckles (or start liking a brand-new profile), sighed heavily, and said, “I've never seen you here before.” The old line fell between us, light as a poker, and sank through the table.
“I've never been here before,” she said. “I don't like it. I should leave.” I shrugged. But she didn't get up.
“This place is filthy,” she said, blaming me.
“Then why don't you stay home like a productive little worker and buy a clean little newspaper and call a nasty little ad and get some big bruiser to visit you in the privacy of your collective household and commit great bodily harm with you?” She stared at me, then took out some cigarettes and lit one. That surprised me. Smoking tobacco is not well thought of. It's self-destructive. She offered me one and Lefty, too. He-she drew a long, thin cylinder from the pack and bowed to the match. I shook my head, refusing. It's a habit I can't afford.
“What are you talking about?” she said finally. She carefully blew her smoke away from me, thinking it would offend.
I frowned. I had assumed she was just an ill-mannered jane, spying on the private lives of her paid companions. What the fuck was she doing here if she didn't even know about the sex ads? If it wasn't for them, who would bother to buy a newspaperâand how could they afford to keep on publishing? “Don't you keep up on current events?” I asked, all patience and sarcasm. “Didn't you ever call up one of those numbers that say âHelp for women troubled by sexual fantasies' or âC-R about oppressive forms of sexuality'? Or is that chain around your neck just bargain-basement jewelry?”
“I didn't know there were any ads like that,” she said slowly. “I guess I've seen them, but I didn't know what they meant.”
“Huh?” I was really confused now. “Then what are you doing here?”
“I just broke up with my ⦠lover,” she said. She was obviously reluctant to label their relationship that way. “She told me about the Labrys. She used to come here beforeâbefore she had me.”
“And how did she have you?”
“What's it to you?”
“That depends on how bad you miss it. Maybe twenty, maybe a laugh. Tell me.”
Her “lover” was a closeted sadist, a very well-camouflaged pervert. You can do that if you are gainfully employed. She worked as a carpenter on the lobster shift so she had an allocation for private living space. In this wee cottage, she had built a dog-house and a rack and many other sordid devices. She had plucked Ms Ingénue from an orientation for apprentices, sensing which way her far-from-reedy self could be bent. Our tail-wagging, panting little woofer spent every possible minute with her, and when she did she was always in a wooden set of stocks and had a plug up her butt. Much was made of leashes and spanking bad puppies. She slept in the aforementioned doggie-hut, and did all her drinking and eating out of little dishes on the floor. I shudder to think where she performed her baser functions. I was charmed. Unfortunately, the puppy had become an apprentice in earnest and had to report for a daylight shift, so her pragmatic trainer gave her the gate, and went out and got a mutt that was more available.
“You really are disgusting,” I crooned, kicking her feet apart under the table. “What a lovely little freak you are. Letting her push you around that way. What did we have a revolution for if women are going to wallow in this reactionary masochism? Hmm? It's decadent, diseased, self-indulgent, immature, impractical.”
“At least I never did it for money,” she said.
Her defiance made my blood run hot. I jerked my gloves out from under my epaulet and smacked her across the face. She didn't try to put her knees back together. So I loomed up across the table and stuffed the gloves into her mouth. She cried out, so I tamped them in a little further, using four fingers while I held her head.
“I have a problem with the idea that I should spend two years nurturing a snotty-nosed bawling baby until group care will take it away and turn it into a heroine of the future,” I said. “So I can't be a member in good standing of our beloved republic, Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean. Plus I don't seem to be able to hide my unconventional sexual proclivities. Like a taste for making twisted cases of arrested development like you toe the line. You like the way those gloves taste? I ought to work you over with my belt, bitch. But if you had to discipline a lost cause like yourself, you'd want to be paid, too.”
Tears were running down her face. She took her hands off the table, made fists inside her jacket pockets, and came back with a ten in each hand. She shoved them at me across the table, little crumpled paper balls, confessions that her need was stronger than shame.
Lefty had disappeared. We don't like to watch one another do business. I pounced on the money, put it away, and grabbed her by the throat. “You want to walk home with me?” I said. “It's an hour and a half from here to Europe. No, I didn't think so.” I dragged her out of the bar. “You can't wait that long. Here. This will do just fine.” I'd never dropped my pants in that alley before, unless the plumbing in the Labrys was backed up and I needed to piss. But the atmosphere appealed to me that night. There were garbage cans at the entrance that would partially shield us, and the cobblestones were wet but not muddy.
I made her get down on all fours and come after me whining like an animal. Her silly, wrong-looking collar was long enough for me to keep a grip on it, so I backed into the alley, whistling encouragement to her. She was panting, the gloves still wedged in her throat. I got my back up against a damp brick wall and removed them, drew them over my hands, then set her at my crotch. She bit me in her hurry to get the zipper down, and I cuffed her. She came back to my hand and nuzzled against the leather glove and lapped at the sleeve of my jacket.
“Lick it good and I'll beat you,” I promised, shoving her face down toward my split fur, already wet. She growled, then gave herself up to my service. I got a good hold of her hair so I could modulate the tempo a little, then leaned back and enjoyed myself. When my excitement would hit a plateau, I would think about how my studded belt would sound landing on that broad-beamed ass of hers, and I would run my gloved hands down my hips and feel her wet cheeks alongside my snatch, her tongue alongside my clit, and my pulses would start to pound again. She ate me the way you eat somebody you love. She had not learned yet that when you pay for a scene, you are paying for your own pleasure, and if you are “allowed” to provide body worship, you are expected to do it because it makes you hot, not to make the hustler come.
She made me come nice and hard, stayed on my clit while I jerked around, made it last as long as possible until I pushed her away. Then I pried her mouth open with one finger and fit it to my cunt, so that her open mouth covered the whole thing. I started with a little jet, to see how she would react. It feels almost as good as coming, after you've gotten some good head. She drank it without gagging, just leaned back and swallowed, and I pissed as slow as I could.
“You too,” I ordered. I shoved my boot into her crotch to open her legs, and she whimpered and wet herself, both of her hands working under her skirt, trying to make herself come.
I had taken off my belt and hit her ass a dozen times when a bright light hit both of us, and we were hauled out of the alley. It was two cops, a man and a woman. They looked distressed when they realized they had apprehended two women. Now that equal relationships between the sexes are possible, being queer is effete and sort of ungrateful.
One of them had a little machine slung over her shoulder. I didn't think anything about it until the janeâI still didn't know her nameâstarted to protest about invasion of privacy and search warrants. The the lady cop said, “This occurred in a public place,” and hit the switch. Out came a stream of profanity I didn't even remember using. But it was my voice, saying how bad she must want it if she was willing to pay for it, she had to take everything I wanted to give her, and the misogynistic slurs and all. Also her responses. It was flawless evidence. So they wrote her up a ticket and wrote me up a ticket and took us away in separate vans.
I was in jail for three days, seventy-two hours, before they released me. They held me over, playing games with my court date, because they knew I wouldn't get any time, and it offends their clear, simple, dead-wrong cop sense of justice. In the meantime I got interrogated about my sex life and chided for my lack of any real visible means of support. They made it real clear that my number had better not appear in any questionable ads, and I better get my libido re-educated as quick as possible. And, oh yes, I could always do my maternity stint if I needed some time to reassess my life. Or did I want to sign an affidavit of unfitness to reproduce, and then get sterilized? I laughed at them. Who knows what else they might do to you once you're unconscious? Brain surgery? Why not? How would you ever know?
It wasn't too bad. They didn't break my thumbs or anything. They just didn't let me sleep. They sent a trustee with a tin can around to bang on the cell bars every fifteen minutes or so. Three days. Seventy-two hours. On the second day they gave me back my belt and shoelaces. Think they were trying to give me a hint?
Up ahead is a back-to-Africa wagon. A black woman in a white chador is packing it up, getting ready to push it home. They say the Muslim men are raising money to kidnap the women to send them home because they don't really want to go back to Africa, but I figure it's okay to buy from a woman's wagon. Who knows? I'm not sure I would turn down a ticket out of here to any place but the North Pole.
“Hey!” I yell. “You got anything left over? Cheap?” She has cold eggrolls, and I sacrifice the price of my second beer for a little grease and protein. Somebody will be at the Labrys who can front me a drink or two. Lefty, that cheap quick-change artist, he better, the last time I scored I bought him
dinner
.
The bar is only a block away. I skip and run, stuffing my face, singing some crazy song. The sign is dark, so I figure somebody has broken the neon tube again or maybe they didn't pay their bill. But when I get to the door, it's boarded up, and there are all kinds of yellow Health Department notices all over itâquarantine for sexually transmitted diseases, selling alcohol to minors, insufficient insect control, even one for improper drainage. There are also a whole bunch of posters from “a group of residents concerned with the quality of life in this neighborhood” that say they feel this establishment is an eyesore that lowers property values and encourages woman-hating. I'm surprised this rickety, filthy, beloved firetrap manages to stand up under the weight of its own wickedness.
Something rattles down the street. I jump. There she isâmy jane, wearing her ridiculous version of perv fashion, kicking a can down the street. She probably got here just a few minutes before me. Her back is to me. I don't think she's seen me.
This is goddess-sent. I can't make it through a night of carhopping in the red-light district tonight. I have no judgment, no snap. I'll pick up a killer or a cop for sure. I run after her, and she spins around. The puppy has acquired a more defensive attitude. Her black eye makes me wince. It's puffed-out and raw, and so is part of her lip. Her clothes don't look new any more. There's blood and puke on the T-shirt. Her ersatz collar and the plastic jacket are gone. She must have just gotten out of jail.