Fucking Daphne (10 page)

We went out a few more times after that, but then she dropped me. “I can't handle your temper,” she said. We were at Burger Joint
in the Mission, sitting in a corner booth so that everyone walking by could see my red face through the glass. I dropped my half-eaten hamburger and looked at her.

“What the fuck do you mean? I get mad, but I get over it. You gotta let me get mad sometimes.”

“I'm done. You take my patience for granted. Try to find another girl who will put up with that shit. I don't want to deal with it anymore.”

She walked out of the restaurant and I sat there for another hour alone. I looked at my reflection in the side of the napkin holder. I was puffy and red. I looked horrible. The outside matched my inside. Red and swollen, ugly, damaged.
Who the fuck does she think she is?
I thought. I finally got up and left. I lit a cigarette and felt a little better. I told myself I was glad to be rid of her.

But anyway, that's what I remember about Arnie. He wasn't a bad guy. A bit of a skeeze, but not an asshole.

“Hey, I wanna get high. Come into Jay's room with me.” Daphne says this in a bored sort of way. Like she doesn't really want to get high; she just doesn't want to talk to me.

I remember her as a pothead, so I'm more than a little surprised when she pulls out a rig and a bag of speed. Fucking hell. I don't shoot drugs. I mean, I have, sure, but it was a long fucking time ago. And I never knew how to do it myself; I always had to have someone find a vein for me. I was scared of the needle. But she seems to have a pretty good handle on it. She chops up the speed and pours
a little water into a spoon and sucks it up into the syringe, all very methodically. When she jams it into a vein and a little rose cloud floats into the syringe, I have to look away. Then she's all high and talking really fast and moving her hands around.

She motions for me to go ahead, so I follow her lead. When I get the gunk into the syringe, I don't really know what the next step is, but I kind of blunder ahead and figure it out and actually manage to get the thing into a vein. It hurts like hell because the needle is so dull, but in it goes and I hit the plunger and when I pull it out my heart starts racing and I get that
whoosh
, like light behind my eyes, and I'm a little afraid that I did too much. But then it settles in just right and Daphne is looking at me and talking so fast. She's telling me about Fassbinder. She's telling me about
The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant.
I don't know why, but I'm riveted. She's so beautiful.

“I'm Hanna Schygulla, you know? I'm Hanna, the princess who treats her lover like shit because her other lover is treating her like shit. And you are wondering why I want those big hands all over me. You are wondering why I let him touch me, because you find it disgusting.”

I can't figure out why she's going on about the movie. Not a clue. But she looks so pretty as she's talking. Her face is bright pink and her hair is hanging in her face. She's wearing a bikini top and it's tied. I know the film. I guess she remembers this about me. I made her watch that movie one night with me during a long shift when there were almost no johns because it was raining really hard. I brought it from home and she and I sat in front of the television and ate food we'd ordered from Waiters on Wheels and watched this crazy, fucked-up, painful love story. Daphne really liked it. She cried,
I remember. She even kissed me and said she loved me, but I knew she meant as a friend. We fell asleep on the couch and Arnie woke us up in the morning. He was pissed off.

Fassbinder was an ugly, miserable man. Every single character in his films is awful in some very true way. I'm thinking about the movie. Playing it in my head. And then Daphne is on me, kissing me. It's been ages since I've kissed a girl. I just prefer the company of Jack Daniel's and pot, so at first it feels weird. But her lips are so soft and her body is on mine and I feel like you feel when you're in love. I know the rush is really the drugs and has nothing to do with Daphne, but I pretend and kiss her back.

“Tell me you love me,” she says. She's looking at me with her big green eyes and I'm thinking,
What the fuck? How did I get here?
But her skin is so perfect and she's begging me. I slide a couple of fingers in and then a few more, and then I press my thumb into my palm and I'm in to the wrist. It was so fucking easy. “Holy shit,” I mutter, and we fuck like crazy. She starts clawing me and biting. I've never fucked on speed before. It doesn't feel good. She doesn't seem to want to come, either. So I don't really know what to do. I keep pumping but my hand is getting tired. I'm getting a cramp. And just as I'm thinking I'm gonna have to try something else, she climbs off me and I am sort of relieved. I wipe some of the stickiness on Jay's bedspread and sit back against the wall. She's being quiet and I feel out of my body. I have no idea what to say to her. When she starts fixing herself another hit, I really want to leave. I get up, and since she doesn't really acknowledge me, I just slip out the door.

Outside, it's dusk. Not too many people are left. It's quiet. The big groups of girls have become smaller groups, and no one needs to
yell to be heard anymore. I spot Nat half-asleep in a lounge chair and join her by the pool.

“Hey, buddy,” she says.

“Do you have any cigarettes?” I ask, and she hands me one.

“So, how'd you do with Daphne? Did you get her number or anything? I saw you walk into Jay's room with her.”

“Uh, yeah, we just talked about old times. She's a really great girl. I always liked her. She's dating some dude, though.”

“A regular dude?” asks Nat.

“The guy who used to run the massage place.”

My mouth is really dry, so I open another beer and drink some of it. I'm still a little shaky because of the hit I took, but I'm pretty much coming off it now. The beer helps me feel more stable.

I look out at the pool and the few stragglers still at the party. Our friend Jay hasn't been around all day, even though it's her house. She probably took off to a private spot with some girl. That's what she usually does. I know everyone who's left. They are all friends and acquaintances, and some old girlfriend of mine is here, too, but she's ignoring me. She does this thing where she looks at me and doesn't acknowledge me at all. She hasn't spoken to me much since we split up. I don't feel like dealing with her. I feel like Fassbinder. I feel ugly. I have enough other stuff going on; I don't need her.

“You and Anne still don't talk, huh?” Nat asks me when she notices me staring in that direction. Anne giggles loudly and I think it's probably for my benefit. She's such a cunt. In her fucking skimpy-ass bathing suit and her long hair, she looks so LA. Her friends all hate me, too. Every time she walks away I see some of them look around for me.

I grab one of the blow-up rafts and launch it into the pool, then climb in after it. I stick my beer in the floating beer holder and climb aboard. It's gray outside but still sort of warm. It's pretty nice.

I guess it was probably Arnie who turned out Daphne. What a bastard.
But she's not my problem, she's his,
I tell myself. So I drink my beer and lie back on the raft and close my eyes and let the water rock me to sleep.

 

 

N
othing happened, okay? Daphne will tell you differently, but you have to listen to my side of the story. Don't listen to what Dave at the Horseshoe said, or what Dave up at the Nitebreak said, or what Dave the doorman at the I-Beam said. They're all fucking full of shit. Please read this to the end, because nothing happened.

Not to shift blame, but I want to remind you that it was your idea that I hang out with Daphne while you were on tour. First you said you didn't want me hanging out with my straight women friends while you were gone. Fine, I understand that. Then you said you didn't want me hanging out with Dave from work or Davey D. from upstairs, because they would want me to go to the Lusty Lady with them or something, and fine, I understand that, too. But that didn't leave a lot of people for me to hang out with, and when I asked you
who you thought I should hang out with while you were going across the country and back, you said the other band wives. Speaking of which, that was cute at first, lumping me in with all the others, but you know it's a little weird for me sometimes, since I'm dating a girl in a dyke band. You're giving me gender-role issues that I'm not emotionally equipped to deal with, and pardon me if that sounds all hippie-dippy or self-helpy, but I learned it from you anyway.

Even though Daphne, Isis, and Sketcher treat me like one of the guys, I
am
a guy, you know, and Isis and Sketcher wanted to go to Osento, that women-only hot tub place in the Mission, because they heard that Jodie Foster was in there last weekend and she's still shooting that movie here and might be there again. Well, what am I supposed to do on a Friday night? I can be as down as I want, but there's no way in hell I'm going to get into Osento, not in your wildest
Bosom Buddies
dreams. Daphne didn't want me to feel left out, and that's how we ended up, just the two of us, hanging out.

I don't need to give you the play-by-play of the night, so I'll try to shorten this up. Our whole plan was to take acid and go see the Melvins and Alice Donut at the I-Beam. We each took a hit, and timed it so we'd be coming on by the time we hit the club, and peaking during the Donut.

We met up at the Horseshoe and went into the bathroom to tear the hits off the sheet. That's
all
that happened in there. I didn't want to tear off the hits in the middle of the café—we'd have to share with all those fuckers. We dropped the acid and left.

Right as we were outside the café, this white limo pulls up and honks. The window comes down and it's Dave the limo driver. You know, Dave who used to be the EMT who totally kept Anthony
Kiedis from choking on his own vomit after that show at the Cow Palace? Well, he got a really slick job as a limo driver to the stars after that. So he offers up a ride. It's Huey Lewis's limo, and he's supposed to kill time till Huey's gig is done. So we get in and decide what the hell, let's ride around for a while.

Dave is up front, yakking away, when Daphne picks up the Band-Aid box. I guess she found it looking for cigarettes or something; I don't know. All of a sudden, she has it and opens it, and I can tell by the look on her face that it isn't Band-Aids. Dave won't quit talking about Slash and Izzy Stradlin, how they're totally tight now and all that bullshit, when Daphne shows me the contents of the box. She flips up the metal lid and I tell you, it wouldn't take the
Miami Vice
guys to know that was some real fucking cocaine in there. I have to assume it's Huey's stash. This is '80s rock star shit, from the guy who wants a new drug and all that, so you better believe we took it.

We weren't able to cut lines without Dave noticing, so we took turns snorting straight out of the box with a rolled-up dollar bill. There were some straight-up chunks in that shit, too. I tell you, it was the best shit I'd gotten since the Reagan administration. My whole face went numb. I felt like that Nazi dude at the end of
Raiders of the Lost Ark
.

I'm only telling you this so you'll know how and why we got really, really fucked up, and I'm sorry that we did because that's why all the confusion happened. Maybe if we'd stopped there, it would've been fine, but it was still only like 8:00 PM, and there was no way we were stopping, especially since we needed to take the edge off.

The show was great. We had some drinks at the I-Beam—if Dave saw us holding hands there, it's because the acid was super fucking strong. It's that stuff I got from OTO Dave; it was the
weirdest, cartoony-est shit I've ever had. Or maybe it was that with Huey Lewis's coke. Whatever.