Sex and Bacon (3 page)

I was ashamed of myself. I felt giant and lumbering next to her.

There were deep blue circles under Mick’s eyes, but when she smiled at me, her eyes sparkled. She seemed so alive.

My face felt hot.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m Mick.”

Like honey over broken glass
, I thought.

“Funny you don’t look Irish,” I said. I had to force myself not to say anything else, not to giggle.

Remember to keep your mouth shut. You can’t go wrong If you don’t say anything
.

“Like Mick Jagger,” she said. She laughed.

“I know,” I said.

Mick ordered her own pot of tea from the tiny waiter. Earl Grey.

Her tea choice seemed sophisticated to me, like what you’d ask for if you were European and sitting in a sidewalk café somewhere in the Montmartre. I had tried to like Earl Grey in the past, but to me it always just tasted like hot perfume or like dry wine: tannic, with an herbal aftertaste. I liked to drink sweet things, not things that seemed like they sucked all the moisture out of my mouth while I drank them. Astringent wine and bitter tea just seemed like unnecessary punishment.

I preferred English breakfast with real cream and real sugar. I never drank to the bottom of my cup because I didn’t like the wet tea-leaf fragments in the last few sips. Supposedly some fortune tellers could read those tea leaves and predict what was going to happen to you. I wondered if the leaves actually spelled out -words, or if they formed pictures, or if the deal was more like
how many
leaves and where they stuck to the sides of the cup.

Mick drank her Earl Grey plain and hot. The scent of the lavender oil mixing with Mick’s smells made me feel drunk. I wanted to lean forward and press my face against her chest and just breathe in her scents forever.

I noticed our waiter hadn’t asked Mick if she wanted cake.

“So, Mick,” I said. “What do you do for a living? “ I hated asking that question. It made it sound like I was interviewing her for a job—though in a way I was. Honestly, I just wondered what a creature like herself could possibly do in the mundane world. I couldn’t see her in a cubicle. Her radiance would distract everyone, beaming up from behind the ‘walls of her partitioned space like a spotlight. Besides, what would she wear? A suit? A skirt? Some sort of Gertrude Stein—ish ensemble?

“I’m a rock star,” she said, slowly and sardonically. The way she drew the words out it was like
rock star
was in quotes—as if she were making fun of the whole rock star thing, or the whole fantasy of being a rock star, or of my question, or of me for asking something so standard and small.

Was
she a rock star? Was she just teasing me? Was she waiting for me to go
Wow!
and start asking questions like
Which band are you in?
so she could laugh at my gullibility? I felt like a dumb kid asking for an autograph, unsure of how to interact with someone who so exceeded my own social ease.

“What’s your
career trajectory
, pretty girl?” The invisible quotation marks again.

“I’m a stripper. I also model,” I said. I didn’t feel like I needed to go into the fact that my modeling mostly consisted of plugging up my various orifices with plastic toys, and that my pictorials were mostly on the Internet instead of in glossy magazines.

“A stripper,” Mick said, contemplatively. “Well, that’s cool. You like it?”

“It’s fine,” I said. “The money’s decent.”

We drank our tea.

“You want to take a walk? “ said Mick.

We put on our coats. I felt ashamed of my wool coat with the too-short sleeves. Mick’s leather coat looked as if she’d been born in it, or born to wear it. It smelled like a million different last calls at a million different bars. It smelled like various interchangeable intrigues with scores of beautiful, tragic women, and Mick saying,“Baby I love you, but I got to go.” I knew that what I was picturing was corny and probably not even true, but it was still affecting.

It was the kind of affecting that made my panties wet. I had worn my black see-through boy-cut ones with lace, just in case.

I was taller than Mick. But then again, I was wearing big chunky-heeled platform shoes, so I was taller than everyone. My height didn’t mean anything—it was a cheat, like an underwire bra or the clear mascara I used to keep my eyebrows neatly groomed. I figured that flat-footed we’d probably be eye to eye. The thought of being that close to Mick thrilled me.

We walked down Broadway toward Seattle Central Community College, then we crossed the street and walked back. The air smelled so good—tidal, like salt water. I loved winter, and I was glad it was coming.

I took Mick’s arm. She moved my hand from the bend of her elbow and held it instead.

We were holding hands. Everyone could see that we were a couple. We
weren’t
a couple really, of course, but I felt like everyone who passed us was looking at us and smiling and going,
Oh, how adorable: lesbians!
Lesbians were way cuter than gay men. Two gay men holding hands just looked like some kind of political statement. Lesbian hand-holding was softer, and sweeter.

I had never understood the word
ligbthearted
before. I’d never thought of it as an actual, physical description, like a symptom you’d describe to a doctor. I’d thought
ligbthearted
was more metaphoric, something that had meaning only to poets or other insufferably sensitive individuals, like the kind of old ladies who gardened and said stuff like
happy as a lark
. But my heart really
did
feel light, like it was up near my throat and weightless. I felt like I’d taken a hit of acid—the lifting sensation I was experiencing, walking down the street with Mick, was weirdly similar to the first rush of a lush, sensual trip coming on. It was like free-fall, if falling didn’t scare you. Or like falling
up
into the silvery winter sky.

“I was just thinking,” she remarked, “about how much I love Seattle when it’s cold. I love the rain and the short days. Do you? ” There were no invisible quotation marks in her words. She sounded thoughtful, and a little sad.

“I feel the same way,” I said.

“Do you want to come home with me?” Again, her voice was grave.

“Yes,” I said. I did. I wanted to very badly. I wanted privacy with Mick, to see if she’d try to kiss me, if she even
wanted
to. But I was also deeply curious about where she lived. It was like I wanted to know everything I could about her all at once. I was gobbling up information. Again, it was that acidy feeling of suddenly having a dozen senses, instead of only five. I felt keenly open, and aware, and awake.

We walked up John Street, toward Fifteenth Avenue, to her apartment. Her building was a big white run-down house with a sagging porch facing a sad, muddy little front yard. There were a bunch of battered bikes chained with actual chains and padlocks to the porch and the front steps, the way the squatter kids on Broadway locked up their bikes. Some bikes were missing wheels.

The front door was unlocked, and Mick pushed it open. The hall inside was very dark and had that apartmenty smell of roach spray, gas ovens, old food, and ancient, ghostly cigarettes. There were posters thumbtacked to the walls alongside flyers for bands and lost pets. The walls had been spackled, but nobody had pained over the white spots, so the spackle stood out like scabs. There was a pile of
Strangers
, under the mailboxes. I wondered if that was where Mick got her copy of the issue that featured my ad.

I felt immediately comfortable. It was a dive, a punk rock hippie house. I bet the tenants stayed up late and played their stereos loud, and I bet nobody ever knocked on the walls or complained, because they were up late playing their music, too. In houses like this,
roommate
was a nebulous concept, made up of whoever was crashing with you for days or weeks and chipping in with rent money, drugs, or groceries. Sometimes you had roommates, and sometimes you didn’t. It depended on who was in town, who you were dating, and which of your friends had gotten kicked out, fired, or evicted.

The turned-up thump of someone’s bass from upstairs made me feel safe and at home. The bass line was jumpy and crazy. Was it Primus? I loved apartment buildings where in the middle of a working day people were home, smoking weed and cranking up their music.

I figured people probably ate a lot of Top Ramen here.

We walked down the hall. I smelled cat pee and, sure enough, the sweet, insidious odor of pot.

Mick reached her door. We paused while she pulled keys on a long chain out of her pants pocket. The top half of the door was mostly covered by a big poster for the band Hater. I made a mental note to check out Hater at the used CD store on lower Broadway Mick was the coolest person I’d ever met, and I figured Hater would probably be really good. Plus, if she said anything about them, I could sound knowledgeable. Maybe I could even bring them up casually sometime when we weren’t at the apartment, so it wouldn’t look like I was just bringing them up because of the poster.

Her apartment was one huge room, with a futon against one wall. There were clothes everywhere. Her scent pushed into my face as we entered. Concentrated eau de Mick. There were posters on every wall, so many that some of them were layered over each other. I noticed a big one of David Bowie—the red one with his face in black-and-white makeup from
Diamond Dogs
.

I was never a huge Bowie fan, frankly. But now I wanted to be. I wanted to like the same things Mick liked. Bowie was okay, it was just that so many of his songs seemed dreary and overly orchestrated.

I preferred faster, heavier music. I liked Alice in Chains a lot—the way Layne Staley’s voice soared over the slamming, sludgy bass, and the way Jerry Cantrell harmonized with him. Sometimes when I listened to Alice in Chains, I imagined that Layne Staley was in love with me and was writing songs about me. I also thought about him fucking me, spreading my legs and holding me down. I didn’t know if he was handsome, but I figured anyone who could sing the way he could was probably dirty and sexy enough to leave his boots and Levi’s on while he fucked me.

Sometimes, I imagined, he left his cowboy hat on, too.

There were dried flowers, furniture, books, and records everywhere. I couldn’t look around enough—there was so much to take in.

“Please, sit down,” Mick said. I sat on the bed. The futon mattress was bare. There were a few blankets crumpled down on one end plus bunches of clothes all matted and tangled around each other. It looked like a nest, not a bed.

From the way the blankets were kicked down to the foot of the mattress, I guessed Mick probably didn’t sleep much—or didn’t sleep well. That would explain the dark circles under her eyes. I wondered if she had insomnia, or nightmares, or if she was just too crackling with energy to actually lie down and sleep.

Though it was only late afternoon, the light was already fading. Mick fussed with the stereo and put on something I didn’t recognize. It was surprisingly pretty—I wouldn’t have guessed she’d have picked something so girlish. I didn’t mind that she hadn’t bothered to turn on the overhead light—the room was dim, but not dark. I thought,
In half an hour the sun will be down and one of us will turn on the lights, and all of a sudden it will be bright and cozy inside and cold and dark outside, and maybe I’ll just stay
.

Mick sat next to me. I put my head on her shoulder.

We sat, listening to the music.

After a little while Mick kissed me. Her lips were so soft. Her tongue tasted of lavender and felt as soft as old velvet.

As the light disappeared, we lay together on a bed of discarded clothes. Neither of us got up to turn on the lights.

The music ended, and for hours all I heard through the speakers was the record player’s needle, softly and endlessly bumping against the last groove of the last track.

THREE DAYS LATER,
in a sweet haze, I left her apartment to buy food for us. In the tea and coffee aisle of the grocery store, I spied a tiny metal box of loose Karl Grey tea. Slipping off the lid of the box, I inhaled deeply.

And sure enough, under the bergamot and the dusty smell of the tea itself, twining around and through the smell of lavender like a long, sweet kiss, was the scent of Mick’s creaky leather jacket.

“SPLOSHING” IS A SPECIFIC FETISH INVOLVING NAKED GIRLS
and messy food. I’ve seen pictures on the Internet of everything from a series of bare asses planted firmly in birthday cakes to a good-humored nude model languishing in a bathtub filled with baked beans. Even Annie Leibovitz wasn’t above photographing Whoopi Goldberg in a tub of milk. Whoopi’s skin glowed like chocolate and her broad smile was telling: She was having fun romping naked in milk.

I have to admit that sploshing isn’t a fetish I find personally compelling—generally I prefer food
In
me to food
on
me. And despite the undeniable down-home charm of using fruits and vegetables in lieu of manufactured sex toys, I’ve never met an ear of corn I’ve liked enough to take to bed. When it comes to produce, I just want to be friends.