Rat Bohemia (18 page)

The women's part of the program consisted of ethereal, asexual, femme forms floating in some softcore dimension.

I was sitting in front of the right-wingers and behind Manuel, who sobbed continuously from beginning to end. But the right-wingers
were adamant. After each film they read aloud the names of the people listed in the credits, the list of public enemies. Anyone named after a Communist got a particularly loud wave of scorn.

“Raoul Fidel Troyano,” they read out loud in unison. But then a funny thing happened. Every time something really Cuban came on the screen they lurched. Like when one pathetic gay guy in a park offered the other pathetic gay guy a swig from a bottle of Cuban rum. Everyone leaned forward to see the label on the bottle. They wanted to see the details.

Afterwards, I lingered outside and waited for Lourdes and her entourage to emerge. They politely switched to English to accommodate me, so I guessed I was temporarily welcomed into the group.

“That one with the ethereal females,” I said. “I didn't get that one.”

“I've seen that one twice before,” she said. “It had serious lesbian undertones.”

She held herself by the shoulders and a shudder ran all through her body like I had her cunt in my lap.

“Let's go home,” she said to her friends, and then to me, “Do you want to come along? ”

“Where are we going? ” I asked.

“Anywhere,” she said.

“Well, we could just go to your house,” I said. “I mean I know I was a jerk to you. I apologize. I know I did the wrong thing. I know I was an asshole. But we both know how good it is going to feel.”

Her friends walked on conveniently ahead.

Lourdes slipped her arm into my arm and turned around to face me on the street. I thought I was about to be kissed.

“You are an asshole. You are a big asshole. What do you think you are, God's gift to women? You're slime. You think you can just clap your hands and my pussy's gonna crawl? ”

“Oh,” I said. “You're gonna let me have it instead of just taking me home.”

“First I'm gonna call you an asshole,” she said. “Then we're going to have sex.”

“Oh, okay,” I said. “Go ahead then.”

She slapped me across the face. Her friends were farther and farther away.

“What's wrong with you, Rita?” she said. “Sexually, you're great. Emotionally, you suck.”

“Emotionally?” I shrieked, outraged. “You're the one who doesn't connect. I've never had such a cold fuck in my life. Miss Icy.”

“Listen honey,” she said. “Why don't we try to really get to know each other?”

“Like a relationship?” I croaked.

“Well, I wouldn't go that far, but I at least think we should go out on a date.”

“A date?”

“Tonight we'll have hot sex and then later on in the week we'll go to a museum.”

“Okay,” I said. “Wednesday? ”

“I can't,” she said. “I have to go see my son in Union City.”

“You have a son in Union City?” I asked. “What is this? Is omission your middle name?”

“Mission?”

“No, omission. You know how fearful people make love—the ommissionary position.”

“There's a lot you don't know and can't imagine. Just ask.”

“Okay,” I said. “I will. That's enough punishment. Can we go home now?”

“My way?”

“Only your way? ”

“Only.”

“Well,” I said. “Right this second my desire for you is larger than everything I know to be true about science and daily life. But if the only way you're going to fuck me is with an unnecessary glove on your hand, then I guess there is nothing I can do about it even though I think it is ridiculous.”

“First we go have a drink.”

She engaged me in a brisk walk around Chelsea and the more I got dragged along the more I felt out of my element. Like there are two neighborhoods in her neighborhood. One is Spanish and the other is gay. She belongs to both. Going out with her meant sitting in expensive restaurants eating delicious, incredibly overpriced things while she talked to the waiter in Spanish and to the owner in flirtatious arrogance.

“I once came here with a bunch of dykes,” she said. “The owner didn't like that. We sat here all through drinks and dinner loudly comparing our cleavages.”

After that I didn't know what she was talking about. Something having to do with computers, about how they work.

“What
is
software? ” I asked.

She stared blankly.

Everything she ordered was incredible. Sautéed mushrooms in garlic and cilantro, crab and avocado salad, gingered oysters. She could talk forever and forever. Ten generations of Spanish aristocracy and two of Cuban aristocracy chatting on the veranda and two of Miami ghettoed bitterness. Some Panama, one Arab, one Jew, and a heavy dose of Union City, New Jersey. Astrology, occult, Spanish words I do not know. I never felt so plain and limited. What a relief. She would be and do everything.

But touching on the street did not feel safe.

“Men bother me every day of my life,” I said.

“They don't touch
me
,” she said. “I'm like a brick wall.”

We ducked into the Rawhide, a greasy men's bar, just on a whim and it turned out to be one of those dens of kind oppression. We could touch and the old queens were drunk and nice. I leaned against the wood like some big dyke and held her by the waist, her arms around my neck. Finally, I liked it.

“I like to be touched,” she said. “But not right away. I need to warm up.”

By the time we got home it was one happy time. Threw her over my shoulder and down on the bed. She and her music, candles, red wine, fucking bullshit latex gloves, tube of lube, all accoutrement—completely commodified.

“Let's use spit,” I said, refusing all purchasable items.

“No. I have my idea. Seduce me.”

“What does
seduce me
mean?”

“Go slow,” she said. “It's too good to go fast.”

Everything I said was what I really felt. Everything I did was what I really wanted. I was never disconnected. I was never in service. It was a two-way street from beginning to end. Fuck a girl in the ass and she's really yours. Her body on your arm like a Popsicle treat.

There was no love between us. None at all and there never would be. There was no understanding. Nothing to talk about. I come from no mobility. She comes from fallen grandeur. She whipped out another round of those silly gloves. We were kissing and I started thinking.

“Aren't you afraid of saliva too?” I said, her tongue in my mouth.

“Your timing stinks,” she said. “Your timing is really bad.”

“I don't know you at all,” I said. “I only know a few things. You're
smart and angry and sexy and sad. You're opinionated.”

“Opinionated? Me? I know when to keep my opinions to myself.”

Later, when my thoughts turned to that night, I had one memory. I am holding her in the morning. All separation between our bodies has been worn down through the night. Everything is quiet now. My hands are on her back and shoulders. Her eyes are cold. She had a faint smile on her lips. I separated her legs and looked at her labia in the sunlight, honking cars and sirens passing outside the window. I eat her, she turns to wax. See, we can make love in the morning, quietly. No pot, no night, no soundtrack from the CD player.

“That's how you tell racial origins,” she says later as I fingered her once again. “The darkness at the ends of my genitals.”

“Really?” I said, looking at mine. Just pink. It sounded like another theory. Like computers and the stars.

“Really.”

And then the memory of David's dad standing in the sunlight came into my head out of nowhere and I realized that I missed my father desperately.

The fact is that in real life, not just on TV, most teenagers get some kind of family cheerleading when they go out on their first date.

Most of my friends who were straight remember a wistful enthusiasm unless they were Catholic girls with fearful memories. But then there could be the parading of a new dress before father's tempered approval and a collective anticipation as the first doorbell rang.

“What's he like? ” mothers and sisters and neighbors would gossip on grocery checkout lines and in the Laundromat about potential boyfriends and cute boys next door.

Even later, after fifteen, when dates were all about drinking and drugs and hand-jobs with skeevy longhairs with bad skin and no future. Even then my friends' beaus would be invited into the living room, shake hands and be forewarned. Encouraging or obstructive, there was a recognition of the importance of these events. Daughters and sons were permitted a kind of preening and exhibition as they measured their desirability in the mirror before Mom and Dad.

For me there was no ritual. There was only secrecy. An institutionalized hiding and deception from the earliest age. My dates were unnoticed. My hopes had to be obscured. As I wondered silently what she would want me to wear, how she would like my hair, what gift would please her, what story, what act. What does she like about me? All the while I had to carry on my life without the slightest hint of its existence.

At dinner Dad would tease Howie about a sparkly brunette
named Linda while I ate, silently, tragically, hoping not to be noticed. Eating in a state of rage. The Haases and the Weemses would pass in the hallway with approving comments about nice young couples and decent hardworking girls, young men. I worked hard. I was decent.

But all the time Claudia and I carefully withheld meaning and expression until the sack containing my heart constricted, habitually. I can say honestly that I have never recovered. I am absolutely furious and filled with grief to have had these pleasures taken from me when I was so, so young.

It is just like that scene in Jeanette Winterson's
The Passion
where a young woman leaves her heart back in her married lover's chamber. This event—my love for Claudia Haas and her love for me—is a moment of my personal history in which I have left behind the romantic flights of fancy of a young girl with an open heart. That girl never existed. She was replaced instead by a security guard, a croupier, a study hall monitor, an economist, a soldier, a snake.

My father came home unexpectedly in the middle of the day and found us embracing on his queen-sized bed. Claudia wisely fled. What followed was a murderously humiliating scenario in which my dignity as a human being was erased, permanently, from the family lexicon.

My solitude at this moment. My deep diminishment obscured two facts that would only come to light fifteen years later. First that I did not do anything wrong, even though I was deeply punished. Second, that my father should have been overjoyed that someone loved me and that I loved them. Why should such basic observations—ones available to most straight people without a second
thought—elude me until adulthood and then their devastation continue unmitigated?

After walking around the neighborhood, that first afternoon, I took the Seven train into the city and walked around all night. It was 1975. Few homeless people, no crackheads. A young girl could ride the trains and walk the streets with only internal horrors. Looking back now, twenty years later, I see how impossible my flight/ exile would be today. I see how much harder, angrier, how much more abused those sixteen-year-old dykes are—roaming around without familial love, late at night. And I also see how much more there is for them now than there was for me. And how little there is for both of us.

It was the desire to avoid devastation that always kept me from calling my dad. Fathers are America's greatest disappointment. Very few of them seem to have done their job. But the ones who came through are so loved. They are adored. The ones who took the time to listen, to ask you questions about yourself, to be happy for you. To actively care.

I have always felt that my father, Eddie, could do that for me anytime he wished. And, frankly, I never understood why he didn't want to because basically I am a terrific person in many ways. I am someone that a father could love.

As my life has progressed, I have changed. I have learned things and come to understand new things. So it would seem natural that my father would do the same. That's why his abandonment of me has always been a big surprise. Every couple of years, I tried a new approach to see if he could get it. To see if he could get why I am worth loving.

The thing is that now the guy is getting old. Really old. I'm used to death and I think about it casually, so I have no trouble knowing that my father will die. My problem is that as long as he is still alive, he has the chance, every second, to change the way he views me. So every time he refuses, I'm devastated. Because I don't want my father to die with me knowing that he had that chance every day and never took it. How will I be able to live with that for the rest of my life? At least while he's alive I can hope that he will, someday, try.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I ever got a chance
to know him. I have a sneaking suspicion that it wouldn't take very long to find out what he was really like. Probably just three or four visits. But it's the not being sure that keeps me crazy. The vague possibility that he might be able to come through fills me, daily, with rage.

I picked up the phone, feeling sick to my stomach, ugly, hateful, repulsive, disgusting. I waited, knowing that I am bad.