Sex for America: Politically Inspired Erotica (11 page)

“Do you remember,” she said, “the early days of Queer Na- tion?”

Yes, I said, I did.

“Do you remember,” she asked, “going into malls for kiss-ins and asking straight girls if they wanted to make a statement?”

Yes, I said, of course I did.

“And,” she asked, if they said ‘yes’,” she said, “you’d kiss them?”

* They’d been married more than twenty years. He was dying. Living in sin seemed good enough for me if it was good enough for them. Of course, the last time they tried to have sex, the Jehovah’s Witnesses interrupted them, but I can hope for bet- ter. Or maybe laughing is just fine.

Yes, I said. I remembered. “If,” she said, “you want to make a statement with me, I would love to make a statement with you.”

The world stopped for a minute.

“So,” she said. “Do you want to make a statement?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I’m not sure how long I was crying for.

Only that I wasn’t crying alone.

Later that night I called my brother, an attorney in Los An- geles. “You know what’s happening in San Francisco,” I said. “This round probably won’t hold up,” he said. “I know,” I said. But I might get married anyway.” I explained the best reason for getting married I’d heard, the one that had convinced me: The courts would soon put a stop to these marriages, but there were couples all over the country who wished to get married and could not be in San Francisco for reasons of privilege of one sort or another—money, safety, and otherwise. We should, the argument went, get married on their behalf. Represent them in the statistics taken. We should do it for those who couldn’t. My brother listened then laughed. “You do realize,” he said, “that these are just about the only circumstances under which I can see you getting married.”

At some point, though, here’s what happened. We cried more. The cat got off the table. A few dinners got made. The TV went off and on and we went to work and slept and kissed, the real and warm of her mouth against mine making me realize something. I wanted marriage to mean something beyond resistance. I wanted my wedding, our marriage, if we chose it, to be the celebration and the pledge of fusing two lives together. I didn’t want my wedding to be a test case. I want promises made in love to mean more than litigation.

There are photos of me at the age of five or so, wearing a veil and a wedding dress, playing dress-up. Not so many years ago, this was good training for the best a girl could expect from her life. For some, maybe that’s still true. And though my mother wished desperately for me to choose the doctor costume first, the bridal getup had the better hat.

For me, the expectation of marriage was something so deeply ingrained early on that no matter my fear, dislike, and critique of it as an adult, the promises of a happily-ever-afterness still sing in my cells once in a while. And I’m ashamed to admit this. Because it feels shallow to me, like getting hot to mainstream porn, like wanting something from Old Navy even though you know it was made in a sweatshop, like somehow being the same as everything you thought you’d spent your whole life fighting against.

The truth is, I was never married. But I have been divorced. Even though all that I can correctly say is, “We split up.” If I had said “divorced,” maybe co-workers would have looked at me dif- ferently when I crept in late to work, red-eyed and suddenly stum- bling, heaving-chested to the bathroom. Or when I didn’t come in at all. I don’t know that their opinions were any different than if I’d been married to a man. I really have no way of knowing.

She took the apartment. We split up the cats. She took a sub- let. I found a roommate, found an apartment. We tore our lives, our hearts, apart and then I called her sobbing: I’d had to sign a form at work to end her healthcare. The form said, “Termination of Domestic Partnership.” I called her through a choked throat, tried to explain. She tried to make it better. We hung up.

And then the certified letter arrived at her door, notarized. Not even needing her signature. In Saudi Arabia, it used to be

possible to get a divorce by saying “I divorce you” three times. All it takes in America now, if you’re queer and a registered domestic partner, is a notarized signature. If you’re not registered, it takes even less.

I have never written marriage vows. Here are, belatedly, my divorce vows. My dear , who shared my heart for nine years, who will be in a part of my heart always: maybe, regardless what happens, there was a special love, a special fight in having had to get the power of attorney, to garner the domestic partner status through two different agencies, to correct the “roommate” slips, to have written the next-of-kin name in on forms with no legal protection. I jumped through these hoops with you, and I regret that our forever came sooner than the oldest ages we could reach. If there ever was a marriage vow I could give you, could have given you, it is this: I wish for your happiness every night as fervently as I wish for my own.

And, should your new someday love lead you that way, I hope you’ll invite me to your wedding.

WOMB SHE LTER
‌

JONATHAN AMES

Yesterday, I was watching the girls play tennis.

I was trying to catch glimpses of panties beneath the little skirts.

Meanwhile, bombs were being dropped in Afghanistan. But the girls were still trying. Serving, running, volleying. Bending over. Yeah. Bend over. When I was fifteen I’d be alone in my base- ment watching Chris Everett on the television, my hands in my pants, waiting for her to bend over.

I also liked Tracy Austin’s ass and Evonne Goolagong’s. What a name. Goolagong. I think she might have been an Aborigine. You know she had a sweet pussy. A brunette pussy. I wish I could lick it right now. Even if she’s fifty. To hell with writing. I’d like to lick Evonne Goolagong’s pussy right now!

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Anyway, the girls were playing. Six courts. Twelve girls. End- of-the-day fall light. Very pretty. Clean air. College! Hope! Young people! Flyers on bulletin boards! Go, tennis team! Blond pony- tails. Long legs. Smooth legs. Twelve sweet pussies hidden some- where in those skirts. Lots of bending over. Bombs dropping.

I was getting this delicious display of young bottom because I’m Writer-in-Residence for a month at this all-girls college. It’s deep in the South. They have me up on a hill in a house, behind some trees, hidden. Like Anthony Perkins in
Psycho
. Down below is the soccer field and the tennis courts.

The tennis match was against Sweet-Briar-Fur-Patch College, and I have to say those girls were blonder, richer, classier. You could see it in their strokes. Their sneers. Oh, to have one of them in bed. This thin blonde with a good net game comes to mind. She was wearing glasses! Glasses on a girl can be very sexy.

One time, years ago, late at night on Rue St. Denis in Paris, which is lined with hundreds of whores (it’s legal in Paris), I wasn’t tempted by any of the women. I enjoyed looking—it was fun, sure—but I was impervious; wasn’t going to waste my money, wasn’t going to risk getting crabs or who knows what, even with a condom. So I watched the parade of my fellow men. The lonely suckers. There were probably a thousand men marching up and down the street for three hundred hookers. I was in the parade, but I was above it all. A voyeur. A writer observing life!

Then I saw this one wearing glasses. That did it. Had to have her. She was dark-haired and short. A sexy body. Full tits. A pretty face. But it was those cat-shaped black glasses. Oh, those glasses. So we climb three flights to her horrible room. Low ceiling.

Slanted floor. Walls so thin you could trace a drawing; something

like that. The room had seen too much sad fucking. I gave her the money. She told me to undress. I did what she told me. Then she washed my cock with a wet rag. Probably spread diseases on it. Anthrax. Put anthrax on my cock. Wait, this was 1989. That wasn’t popular back then.

After the cock cleaning, she undressed. Her body all trussed up in bra and girdle and hoses and clamps and hidden steel beams came melting out. Tits all dead. A Caesarian scar and stretch marks on her belly. But I had already paid. She yanked my thing to life and put a condom on it. We lay down. I caught a glimpse of her bush underneath a roll of fat. She took her glasses off, remember- ing at the last moment, and put them on the little night table. No! I could handle the scar, the fat, the yanking, but I needed those glasses for my hard-on.

But I was too embarrassed to ask. I was young then. Now I know to ask for what I need. Especially when it comes to the hard-on. I deflated, but she grabbed my soft thing and got it in her. She gave a couple of fake moans and kicked her heels in my ass like a jockey. I squeezed a boob and pinched a tired brown nipple. I put my mouth on the nipple and it hardened. This little spark of real life from her, even if involuntary, made me get hard, and when I got hard I came. It had lasted sixty seconds. I looked at the glasses on the night table. There’s nothing worse than bad sex. Except bad sex that you’ve paid for. If only she had kept the glasses on.

Anyway, the blonde from Fur Patch College. She had glasses. Thin gold frames. If I had her here in my little house on the hill right now, I’d take her from behind. That tennis lesson ass would intuitively push back for more. Yes, sweet girl. Push back for it.

You sweet beautiful girl. I forgive you your sneer because you’re a doll in bed.

Look over your shoulder at me with those glasses. You dear thing. You’re wearing glasses but you’re on your belly with your gorgeous ass in the air and your puss taking me in. You’re a beauti- ful female animal. We’re playacting at making babies. I love you!

Anyway, these Sweet-Briar-Fur-Patch girls were beating my girls pretty handily. Wouldn’t you know I end up at a poor man’s all-girls college. But what the hell. Better to be here than not to be here. An all-girls college feels like a pretty safe place as we go to war.

I only reported here for duty two days ago. They needed a writer at the last minute. Well, a month ago. But for academia, that’s the last minute. Somebody recommended me, and so they hired me without reading my books. They only read the résumé, which looks good: Leon David, Yale ’86, three novels. But they should have read the novels before letting me down here. I took the job because it’s a one-liner for my friends. “I’m spending a month as writer-in-residence at this all-girls school.” Gave every- body a laugh.

But I don’t know if it’s a laugh. I’ve masturbated nine times in forty-eight hours. That’s way too much at my age, three years shy of forty. I look like I have two black eyes. I’m losing too much semen. All my nutrients are going out my cock. To hell with Af- ghanistan, I need the government to drop some food on
me
. Drop it on my cock. I’m so horny because I’m Jewish. Jews know their life is in danger all the time, that’s why we’re so horny. It’s distaste- ful. We’re about to get it in the neck again, I’m sure. I think Jews must have alien blood in them. Some alien screwed a sexy Jewess

in the dessert five thousand years ago. That’s why we’re hated. We’re part alien. How else do you explain Einstein, Freud, Gersh- win, and Lewinsky?

If Lewinsky hadn’t been so horny and brainy, she never could have sucked Clinton’s cock. Granted, he was a fairly easy target, but still, it took a lot of brains and chutzpah and sex drive to give the president of the United States a blowjob. She’s the Einstein of sex. And if he hadn’t been dealing with his blowjob impeachment, maybe he could have done something in the Middle East and we wouldn’t be going crazy right now bombing and getting bombed.

Well, it’s all too much for me. And now it’s lunchtime. I’ve been writing for two hours, imagining Goolagong’s pussy and re- membering that French pussy and wanting that Fur Patch girl’s pussy. So I’m going to the dining hall where I’ll be surrounded by six hundred real vaginas. Not imaginary. Real. Delicious. Beauti- ful. All being sat on while the girls eat. Incredible. I’m in a womb shelter. Bring on the bombs.