Sex for America: Politically Inspired Erotica (10 page)

Still, the sentiment was nice, and fully worthy of G.B. When he talks about freedom—and he does, he used the word
free
twenty- one times in that State of the Union address—he means it. That was becoming clear to me in the early days of what they were then calling the Persian Gulf Crisis. The thing about freedom is that the more you have, the more the next guy doesn’t. It’s kind of like fresh water: as long as you’re upstream, there’s plenty to go around. The freer you are in the mountains, the thirstier they get near the sea.

Take Max Sec, for example. If I exercised my freedom to de- fend myself against bodily assault, that meant that Rump lost her freedom to express sexual preference. Either way you sliced it, someone wasn’t free.

And there could be no freedom for me while Apache the mountain man was ruling our roost. The sight of his beard over the breakfast table, its greasy tendrils decorated with fragments of scrambled egg, made me nauseated for an entire day as I recalled our forced intimacy. I ceased to cook for Russell and him, and I regretted that I had not yet learned how to rig up a simple incendi- ary device. One would have fitted snugly beneath his truck’s right front wheel.

I was between a rock and a hard place. There were only so many hours I could spend on the factory floor. I tried passing the time at local bars, but I was growing highly impatient to be back, safely ensconced and media-vigilant, in my personal war room dedicated to G.B.

As Week Three of Apache’s stay began, I was set in an uncom- fortable routine. I would put in an hour or so of unpaid overtime at work, making sure, when possible, that my supervisor saw me; eat a microwaved dinner in the employee lounge, which resembled nothing so much as a World War II bunker; and return to the house via Skullduggery, the nearest purveyor of liquor and entertainment, around ten, when I usually found Russell and Apache snoring in their armchairs amid empty beer and whiskey bottles, a pornographic vid- eotape playing on the TV screen. I would then sequester myself for the rest of my waking hours in the guest bedroom with G.B.

In the midst of a tortuous budget struggle, he had coura- geously vetoed a minor civil rights bill that didn’t meet his high

standards of legislative excellence: the Civil Rights Act of 1990. Congress impudently tried to override the veto, but their override fell one vote short, 66–34, and they were feeling impotent com- pared to G.B. Plus, G.B. had reluctantly given the rubber stamp to a couple of “revenue increases,” incurring the wrath of the fis- cal-minded G.O.P. Sure, he had reneged on his tax pledge, which simplistic pundits said had gotten him elected; that didn’t matter to me. It was the posturing manliness of the phrase “Read my lips” that had first interested me in G.B., not the apparent substance of the no-new-taxes message. Fiscal policy is for the small-minded, for the cheap hoarders among us who begrudge the poor a buck or two of Earned Income Credit. It has never been my interest or my specialty.

Anyway, G.B. fell into a temporary public-approval tail- spin—from which he would soon recover dramatically, like the true fighter pilot he used to be—and, isolated from the peons of his party, was flailing weakly. I watched him day after day on the televised campaign trail for the upcoming congressional elections, and more than once I winced. Every sting to G.B. pierced my thin skin just as deeply. At a campaign rally for a Republican candidate in Vermont, G.B. was lambasted by said candidate right up there on the podium. Even though our generous forty-first president had deigned to sit beside him in a gesture of support, Rep. Peter Smith, a freshman congressman running for reelection, said extremely rudely, “My specific disagreements with this administration are a matter of public record.”

When G.B. got up to speak he was so hurt and confused that all he could say was, “We have a sluggish economy out there na- tionally. That’s one of the reasons I favor this deficit so much.”

And then he went off on the hostage situation. Even though the U.S. ambassador in Kuwait City said that the diplomats had plenty of food, G.B. charged they were “being starved by a bru- tal dictator.” At another campaign rally in New England, he went on to say that Iraq had “committed outrageous acts of barbarism. Brutality—I don’t believe that Adolf Hitler ever participated in anything of that nature.”

G.B. was committing senseless gaffes left and right; he was a raging bull in a china shop. Although I felt for him, I was also wor- ried. G.B. was supposed to be a steely pillar of strength for me.

With Week Four of Planet Apache, the leaves were falling from the trees and my frustration reached a fever pitch. I missed my personal space; I missed the pre-Apache peace and harmony. I was nervous and antsy. So on Congressional Election Day, which brought in a poor to mediocre showing for G.B. and company, I visited a doctor—something I had not done since the lead pipe in- cident due to the costs involved—and complained of insomnia. My hysterical tears, and the dark rings beneath my eyes, convinced her my claim was honest, and she prescribed powerful soporifics. At home I ground several of these into a powder in the bath- room, using dead Sarah’s stoneware mortar and pestle, and packed the powder into a straw with tape on both ends. On the pretext of wishing to clear away the thirty-odd beer bottles that had accumu- lated around Apache’s nest in front of the TV, I circulated among the debris and scouted out the scene. He was apparently drinking from a tumbler he had placed without a coaster on the Chippen- dale end table Russell had had appraised at ten thousand dollars. When he slouched out of the room to answer the call of nature, and Russell’s half-open eyes were trained on the semi-clad body

of a hermaphrodite on adult Pay-Per-View—no doubt a product of the sheerest artifice—I slipped the straw from my pocket and emptied it into Apache’s libation.

Half an hour later both he and Russell were sleeping like ba- bies. I took advantage of the respite to make an exhaustive search of Apache’s belongings, which he kept in a ragged army surplus duffel bag. There were threadbare undershirts, unclean socks with holes in their heels, an old towel, a pack of playing cards, a loaded and locked Glock semiautomatic, a utility knife, a T-shirt embla- zoned with the legend “So what if I farted?”, an unused stick of Old Spice deodorant, chewing tobacco, Q-tips in a less than pris- tine condition, and at long last, at the very bottom, a slim dime- store photograph album.

I opened it and flipped through the pages. The album con- tained pictures of only one person: a blond girl. The earliest snap- shots featured her around the age of the three; the most recent, in my estimation, around the age of fourteen. Always thorough, I slipped each one out of its casing, searching for a clue to her identity. The closest I came was a childish scrawl that read, “Love U Daddy.”

Carefully restuffing the bag, I moved next to his safari jacket, which hung beside him on the arm of the chair. He had taken to walking around the house bare-chested, allowing a full view of his pocked and scarred torso. (One nipple had been lopped off in the Crimea.) I knelt down and stealthily searched the pockets. His wallet, to my delight, held an additional picture of his daughter. On the back it said, “Chrissy.”

I was still lacking vital information. I took his keys and went outside and down the block to the truck. In the glove compartment

I found a dog-eared address book. There was no Chrissy listed un- der his last name, but since there were only four people, total, in the address book, I had no trouble singling her out. Under the
P
s I found one address labeled simply “C,” with a telephone number in Louisiana. When I called the number and asked for Chrissy, the woman on the other end said, “She’s asleep, whaddaya think? And who the fuck are you to call this late?”

I ad-libbed and said I was Apache’s girlfriend.

“Yeah? You tell that mofucker to stay the hell away from Chrissy and me.”

The next day, around the time that my lunch hour began, Apache received a call from a nurse at a Baton Rouge hospital. Chrissy was very, very ill and was asking for him. Her mother had told the nurse not to call, but she was so moved by Chrissy’s plea that she took matters into her own hands. Given the urgency.

According to Russell, who told me about it drowsily when I got home with a brand new box of Krispy Kremes, Apache had peeled out before three.

UNDONE
‌

DAPHNE GOTTLIEB

When San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom (whom we tried
to keep out of office with all our hearts) spurned national law and declared that San Francisco would issue marriage licenses, I was living with my _________. We were nothing if not a same- sex couple. She was my . I write because, after being with her for nine years, living together for six, she was hardly my girlfriend, and much more than my lover; she was not my “significant other” and not my “partner,” thank you. She was my (love). And if legally she had to be my “domestic partner” —if that was the only option we had, so be it. But domesticity does not rend buildings to the ground. Love does. She really was my

(love).

It was a few days shy of our nine-year anniversary, the leather anniversary according to Chicago’s Public Library. We’d been to- gether for all but five years of what I consider my “adult” life, if you start counting at twenty-one.
^*

We were deadlocked, trying to decide whether to go get mar- ried or not. It was like trying to decide whether to go get expensive sushi or not. Or buy a new sex toy we might not like. Actually, it was not like that at all.

We were going through a rocky period; a relationship mood swing. It was the kind not unfamiliar to anyone who has been in a relationship that has lasted more than two years recognizes as transient. Even so, each time you think, “Uh oh. It’s over.”

We went back and forth on the marriage thing: Oh yes. Oh no. Uh oh. We fretted privately and together. Marriage was impor- tant. Marriage was assimilationist. This was an important histori- cal moment. This was tokenism.

The fact is, we’d had this conversation many times over nine years. And we’d decided that commitment ceremonies, though they can be really swell, weren’t for us. They lacked any real legal reason to spend that kind of money—limos but no power of at- torney, flowers but no bulletproof custody, champagne but no tax break, no deal. Not our kind of spending. Despite excited exhorta- tion by some friends and enthusiastic hints from parents and sib-

* Which I think is generous. There was someone I met before I turned twenty-one with whom I pledged to spend the rest of my life. It would have worked out, had I died at twenty-two. I think it’s a common phenomenon. At least five in ten. Do you really want what you want at twenty-one to be what you want at forty-one? Not me. Even if it’s the same person, maybe you want different things.

lings, we had demurred for almost nine years. We slyly told them we’d prefer to live in sin. After all, that’s exactly what my mother proposed to my father, albeit under different circumstances.
^*

So. My and I were choosing to live in sin, sort of. I chose to not suburb this, not soft-pedal this, not palliate this, not “my roommate” this. Because she was my wife, I called her, for a while, my “wife.” Which was a grand political statement and a love letter all in one. Until we could actually get married.

And then there it was: our anniversary, Valentine’s Day, and now we could be, like, legit. Obviously, I needed strong ammuni- tion. I took aim at her hatred of tradition. “Oh, no,” I said. “I’m not going to marry you unless you get down on one knee and propose.” We both laughed, and I thought it was over. I breathed a deep sigh. And then she, who I had seen over nine years in sickness and health, who I had seen richer and poorer, shocked the shit out of me.

She got down on one knee and took my hands in hers.