Fucking Daphne (6 page)

Thursday dusk and I headed down the hill for class.

She leaned coolly against the stucco wall in the evening light, glanced up as I approached. “Hey,” she said. “Do you have a cigarette?”

I fumbled with my pack. “I wrote a story about you,” I mumbled. I crinkled the fresh pages in my fist.

She cocked her head to one side. “Why would you do that?”

I lit my own cigarette, then offered her the flame. My face flushed. “I don't know. You know? You said—you said you thought the world of my work.”

“Oh, doll,” she smiled, sort of apologetic. “I say that to all the pretty girls.” She wrapped her lips around the cigarette filter and sucked hard, squinted her eyes as she took it in.

 

 

I
was living in a white Ford Fiesta with a blue stripe along the doors, parked on top of a hill above the Castro district, wheels lodged against the curb. I had a blanket—a present from my ex-fiancée—a bicycle, and a bag of clothes. A few boxes of paper that I thought represented something important were stuffed below the windowpane. In retrospect, they did represent something important, but not what I thought.

I'd been in San Francisco for only a couple of days. I ran out of gas on the Bay Bridge on the way into town, and the emergency worker in a big padded truck asked me if I had a death wish. I could barely hear him with the wind so loud and the cars racing over the bay and the splotchy gray sky. I had to yell to explain that the gas gauge was broken, that I usually got three hundred miles to the tank, but that this tank had only gotten 250, for some reason. He pushed
me onto Treasure Island and injected my car with an electric pump, which forced a quart of gas straight through the hoses and into the engine. I'd been driving aimlessly in the desert for weeks and hadn't had a conversation with someone in what seemed like a long time.

San Francisco was beautiful and full of fog as the ocean air drifted across the city. It was nearly summer. Tufts of clouds hung on the edges of the peaks like cotton caught on a drainpipe. The fog made the colors pop, and the rows of pink and green pastel houses lining the hills had the quality of a painting, like something too perfect to have happened by accident. Nothing felt real, and I wondered if I would stay once I found a job and made some money. I was running out of places to go. I'd been traveling for a long time and had forgotten why.

I went to a poetry reading and I met a poet there, Daphne, with braided black hair, dyed in streaks of orange and pink. She was taller than me by four inches, with a broad, strong back, and her poems were the angry poems of a victim returning home with a box of matches and a can of lighter fluid. Her anger was ravenous and her words were mixed with sadness and self-loathing that ran straight to the bone. In her combat boots, motorcycle jacket, and tar-stained jeans, I thought she was beautiful.

It was late on a Sunday, and there weren't many people in the sharply lit windows of the buses and trolleys clattering down Market Street past the grocery and the taqueria. After the reading, we found our way to a punk rock bar with a solid jukebox full of Pixies and
Ramones, and several rows of hardwood tabletops and tall stools. There were five or six people bellied up at the rail, which is where we sat as well. The bar was not well lit, but there was enough light to see by.

Daphne let me know she was living with her girlfriend and would be for a long time to come. She presented this to me defiantly, like it would change my mind about something. But I didn't care. It had been six months since I'd left my fiancée. Daphne said she'd been an editor for a big magazine, but now she was unemployed and taking pills. I told her I had won a poetry slam back in Chicago. We were both dissatisfied with our current predicaments, not because they were bad, but because they were insulting. We were better than the world was willing to admit. I asked her if she wanted to add a shot to her beer and she said she did.

After a few drinks I slid my hand between her legs. Not inside her jeans; outside, rubbing the denim seam with the bridge of my hand, forcing her zipper against her pelvis. “Oh, we're doing that,” she said, and unzipped my pants and pulled my penis out and started stroking me beneath the bar. The bartender looked over at us once, then looked away. She gripped me tightly and pulled, letting her thumbnail scratch the tip of my penis. I thought she was going to tear my skin. I was so lonely, I laid my head on her cold leather shoulder.

I thought,
Yes, this is San Francisco.
Before San Francisco I'd spent twelve hours in the shade of the post office on a park bench in Moab, Utah, unable to move. Before that I'd spent four months as a ski bum in the Rocky Mountains, those giant outdoor athletic parks where the men outnumber the women seven to one. My two-and-a-half-year
relationship had broken everything inside of me, and I was still running.

I kept a hand on my drink. She yanked my belt buckle and unbuttoned my pants, forced her large hand down further, around my balls, and gave a quick, solid squeeze. I let out a cry and pressed my face into her hair, but nobody seemed to care. I zipped back up and left my empty glass as I followed her drunkenly, belt still undone, into the ladies' room.

What I loved the most about her was her size. She was proportionally Amazonian, thin but with enormous breasts, wide hips, and Marine shoulders. She was so much bigger than me, it was like she could fit me in her pocket.

She forced me up against the back of the stall, her forearm on my neck, her hand inside my shirt, and she kissed me hard. “What do you want?” she asked, pulling away and yanking my shirt over my head.

“Hit me,” I said. Or I might have said, “Hurt me,” or something else. But whatever I said was lost in the fabric; she didn't hear me right. She thought I said, “Choke me,” and she gripped my throat and squeezed my windpipe shut. My breath was gone and I saw stars and she pulled on me frantically. “Come on,” she said. “C'mon, c'mon.” I felt my legs go as the screws and beams rattled in their bearings and then I came all over the stall.

I was lying on the cool pink bathroom floor and she was sitting on the toilet, her jeans bunched over her boots. I ran my fingers gently across her laces while she peed. The bathroom door opened and closed several times but nobody said anything. That's the kind of city San Francisco is.

“I want to see you again,” I said. It was easy for me. I didn't know anyone and I had nothing to lose. She snatched sheets of toilet paper and rubbed them quickly between her legs. She looked down on me with something resembling guilt, but not quite—more like the realization of two ideas that don't exactly contradict, but affect and enhance, each other. She didn't like me anymore. I was desperate and lost and she had problems of her own. “Usually I'm a lesbian,” she said, looking away, flushing the toilet.

I didn't know yet that I would stay in San Francisco for nine years and see her many more times and we'd become friends but not lovers; or that one winter day, on our way to catch some acquaintances at a party, she would ask me to wait with her outside the building, then force her entire fist into my mouth. At the time, on the bathroom floor, I was pretty sure I wouldn't meet her again. I didn't know where I'd be. I leaned toward the tip of her boot, sniffing the old leather of her shoe.

 

 

D
aphne Gottlieb and I met when we did a reading at a small women's college near where she lived. Another queer girl writer, better known than we are, read that night too. Better-Known Girl got paid. We didn't. She asked to get paid. We didn't.

I played spin the bottle with some of the college girls after the reading but put a stop to it before any genital contact occurred. Eight of them ran after my car with their shirts off, their breasts dancing in my rearview mirror. One of them wanted me to come back to her dorm room and spoon. Another was convinced that if I left Mills that night, I would get into a horrible accident and die. It had something to do with the fact that I was wearing a red T-shirt and chose to leave at 2:30 AM, an unlucky hour or something.

Daphne and I had talked about getting together at a bar the next night. I called her and we arranged to meet at the Roost, a
dingy bar that had been taken over by yuppies for no reason we could figure out until someone played David Gray's “Babylon” on the jukebox. We talked mostly about Better-Known Girl. Daphne was pissed at her for getting paid, and I sort of let on that I was pissed, too, even though I wasn't. I think Daphne knew I was wishy-washy about dealing with the dilemma: How typical of Bett Williams to use some boozy sexual escapade with the barely legal as a way to deflect the focus from the issue at hand, once again bringing the attention back to herself.

Daphne was wearing a black dress and boots with soccer socks that hugged her calves. Her black dreads held in tight all the things most people want to wash away. We gossiped about some people we knew, as negatively as possible. At some point the negativity reached total saturation level and we achieved an amiable ease. Because I was willing to be critical, she seemed to trust me.

She leaned in closer and I thought,
Some people I know want to fuck Daphne.
During our shitstorm of gossip and complaining, I scanned the chaos of her body and face for the reasons why. I came up with more than a few. I wondered if she had normal, boring sex, or if her lovers had to have a PhD in alt sex in order to not get laughed out of the room.

I don't know how it happened that the conversation turned to pills—Lexapro, Effexor, Xanax, Wellbutrin. Daphne was on all sorts of pills at various times and at the same time. She said that without pills, she would most definitely be dead. At that moment she was on Effexor, Klonopin, pot, and Bushmills.

“I'm actually on a Lexapro right now,” I shared. I saw a charge go through her body the instant the L-word was spoken.

“I love Lexapro!” she said. “Lexapro totally makes me feel like I'm on E!”

“Seems okay.”

“How long have you been taking it?” She had a green plastic clip in her hair. It was in the shape of a bird. She took it off, clipped it on her pinkie finger, and tapped out a rhythm with it.

“I just took one this morning. There was a bottle in the dorm room at the school.”

“I'm on Effexor right now, but I think I'm going to switch back to Lexapro,” she said. My previous comment slid by as if it were completely normal.

“Basically, I like Vicodin,” I said. I made sure the sentence came out in the most pared-down, Strunk and White sort of way so the subtext could be read easily: “Basically, I like Vicodin” equals
Do you have any Vicodin?