I had sex with a boy last week. It was long and hot and left the roots of my hair wet for inches, as we just kept trying to make each other try to come again and again as if we were trying to save each others’ lives and it became like that seemingly universal imaginary scenario of your lover who fell off the cliff and was screaming for help with bloody broken compound fracture bones, knowing it would take me longer to come and a toy or two but that it would be like he’d risked his life to steep the cliff, that he might fall or fail. And then, like in the movies, he saved me, and I came one final time and screamed his name like I’d never said it before in my life.
We rolled apart in the dark. I was whole for a minute. I asked him, “What are you thinking about?”
He said, “At that moment? That I was hot and I need to push the covers down.”
“Ah.”
“What are you thinking about?”
I thought about what I was thinking when I asked him the question; when I asked him, it was the same thing we all think when we ask a lover that stupid thousand-year-old question right after sex and hope to hear an answer about connection, about meaning, about hot sex, about irreplaceable sex from that one person. Risk and retribution. But then I thought back a second further, before I had the thought of him and his brain and what I’d hoped to hear about me meaning something. And I remembered what I was actually thinking about.
“I was thinking about how I worked in a cafe for three years after I got off the streets — it wasn’t my first job, which I got at 16 and got fired from for violating the dress code and wearing a spiked collar to work but got enough money in those two weeks to buy a leather jacket that kept me warm on the streets. I painted the Social Distortion logo on the back and studded it. It’s easy to steal from craft stores, and I never got stealing, not once. And it’s so boring on the streets, I just painted and studded for days in between dumpster diving and panhandling and made my jacket, mine.
“But later when I was 18 I worked in a cafe for three years and I was wondering how many people I served coffee to for five days a week for three years, how many people I smiled to and remembered what they liked and how I loved being the person everyone loved to see there. Nearby there was a fire station, and I opened the cafe at 6:30am alone and the firemen would come in one by one and I knew who loved raisin bagels toasted with butter and Earl Grey with the hot water poured over the bag just *so*. The firemen wanted me to be a firegirl, not just because my bob matched their trucks, but they really wanted me to take the test. They’d invite me to the station for tours and let me sit in the trucks, even in the drivers’ seats. I didn’t have the heart to tell them I didn’t graduate from high school (or 9th grade) so I’d never pass any tests.
“The cafe owners tried to fire me more than once for wearing ripped jeans, and for having a visible tattoo. They had kids in private schools. When I closed I’d fucking rob the place for food. I would fill two grocery bags: one was for my housemates and me, the other was for the whores who worked the four scary gnarly streetcorners right outside my house because I knew they needed food and all had kids in nearby apartments and Odwalla juice was the right thing to steal for whores. No one ever noticed the food missing from the cafe.
“I miss serving coffee. My second job that I kept for a while was at a deli chain, and I almost got fired twice but managed to keep my job. I was so barely off the streets. I’d just got my first place to live and I was still 16 and I remember it was a Victorian shithole from hell where I had two rooms to myself that were $142.66 a month and there were holes in the walls where you could see out onto the street and half the kitchen was rotten flooring and caving into the bottom floor so no one could walk over there. But the girl who gifted me the rooms, a New York punk, left her mattress and pillows and a couples blankets and it was mine.
“When I lived there I’d have punks and skinheads (*not* racist ones) come over — and I’m embarrassed to say it, but they’d come over and we’d play role-playing games all night. We did it so much on the streets because it’s so fucking boring on the streets and I could only carry one or two books on me at a time, so I ended up writing and developing my own RPG. We were filthy motherfuckers with bags of D-20s in our pockets. At night, the guys would come over and we’d play. One boy — Veto Void was his name — would stop at the buy-a-slice pizza place and get the free throwaway slices and we’d blow our cash on Jolt and stay up all night and play. For some reason I always ended up being some short character, like a fucking dwarf, and they’d all tease me. Because I’m only 5’4”.
“Veto was such a loner, pale, all in black. He lived in a trailer in someone’s backyard and was 17, and came from a Mormon background. He’d told me he’d grown up thinking masturbation was so evil that whenever he wanted to jack off he’d slash himself on the thighs or arms or stomach. He was covered in thick scars but always wore pants and long sleeves. He never really had a girlfriend, I don’t think. Oh wait, he did once, this girl Katie. She OD’d. On aspirin. She took her time. The EMT’s were screaming at her and one was straddling her chest, “what the FUCK did you take?” and as I was told, she smiled and laughed.
“The RPG boys who’d come over to toss dice were cute and funny and sweet — but some were the kind of guys you’d cross the street from if you know what I mean. But there were also boys like Eric, who was a Goth. He and Steve — who had bleach-blonde hair, which later became a fetish of mine, way before Buffy and Spike — were suburban boys in high school who didn’t fit in and somehow hung out with us. I had a mad crush on Steve but Eric was truly cute: he had black hair and long bangs in his face and he had the one thing no one else had — a car. From his parents, of course. A white piece of shit that none of us could ever afford to buy gas for so we’d go to lots and pop cars, and siphon gas so we could drive around all night blasting Love and Rockets (Express). Imagine a car packed with punks and a face-tattooed skinhead blasting Kundalini Express.
“I could siphon like a pro (came in later handlily @ SRL), but we always made Eric do it. He was like Mr. Pink. He’d whine, ‘why do I always have to do it!?’ and he’d swallow it and vomit gas and we’d laugh and he’d laugh and then he’d screech off with us all in the car laughing and bitching and we were all laughing that he might burp gas and I wanted a cigarette.
“Sometimes we’d go to this place on government property with this huge flagpole. They took the flag down every night and if one person got up on another’s shoulders, you could reach the circular rope. Then the person on top would put both feet in the rope loop, and we’d get him going like a tether ball round and round: I remember Eric went first and then the rope wound shorter and shorter and closer to the pole and he was like, ‘hey guys. guys. HEY! HEY GUYS!” and we were all laughing so hard we were crying, and then there was this loud “BONGGGG” and Eric started unwinding and just moaned “Owwwwaaaaowww…” We all took turns, and some times we’d go do it drunk or high on psychedelics, but we made sure Eric never got bonked again. Spinning around and around in the dark flying through the air was so amazing and free. It was like there was no war, no asshole I had to ask for money, no jerks at the deli spilling shit I had to clean up, no ex-boyfriends strutting around with new girlfriends — or taking swings at me when I wouldn’t fuck them again.
“I thought maybe Steve was the source of my teenage mini-fetish for boys with flat-top bleach blonde hair. But it wasn’t him, it was Bosie. Bosie was a friend I’d met through one of my female best friends from the streets — Rocky. Rocky was tiny and mean and scary and could beat the crap out of anyone, kind of like me. She had shocking blue eyes and black fringe; I had green eyes and a white mowhawk with blue tips. (And if you’re wondering, stealing hair dye was a such non-issue it was so easy. To shave our heads/hawks, we’d just find a public power outlet until someone kicked us out. This one guy on the streets who was 15 and looked like Sid Vicious literally got hard when he’d shave a girls’ head — he had a *real* shaving fetish — so haircuts were as simple as finding Bo.)
“Bosie was a club kid who wore long black leather trenches, and was a friend of some straight high school sports boy douchebag Rocky was dating. Bosie — I never knew his real, or first or last name — wanted to be a hairdresser. He always was fucking these older rich ladies from hair salons and had cash, and we were friends but never ‘together’ — it just wasn’t like that. Bosie introduced me to Sisters of Mercy and more music like that, and we had sex once and it was great but we also thought it was funny; we might have had sex a couple more times but it was just… fun. I dunno. Now, I know, “Bosie“. Maybe I did *actually* have sex with a real gayboy (I’ve always wanted to); I definitely had lots of bi boyfriends on the streets. Our gutter punk boys would go suck cock or get sucked and then come back with $20 for the rest of us to eat or get beer. It didn’t mean anything. It never did. We all used condoms and safer sex anyway, at least in my crowd. I sure wasn’t going to go the sexwork route and it didn’t mess with the guys’ image of themselves, so who cared?
“Anyway, at the deli I made friends with this guy Ian; we worked the closing shift together and he was 19 and I’d take him with me to hang out with the other street punks, my friends and family, after work. After all our closing duties at around 11pm, we’d grab the biggest to-go cups and fill them with beer or wine and go out and find my gutter punk friends. One night at some stupid outside party at someone’s house, Ian left early and he hugged and kissed me like usual and said goodbye. He went home, and hung himself.
“I found out Ian was dead when I got to work the next day, and I lost it. Since I was already the freak, I guess it was easy for everyone to decide that it was my fault. One coworker told me to my face that Ian was in love with me and I made him kill himself. I started to find notes taped to my timecard from different “anonymous” people that I was a “cunt” for making Ian kill himself with my freakiness and my fucked up friends. All I could do was wander around the streets off the clock crying openly not giving a fuck what strangers thought because I’d lost my best friend in the world and I’d never know why. I quit because the hate and blame was killing me. In my last check, there was a piece of paper written on by many of my coworkers saying things like, “I always knew you were a little bich” [SIC] and how it was all my fault. I wasn’t invited to Ian’s funeral.
“On the day I got my check and the note I called Bosie. I sat outside the deli and cried; they could all see me. I called Bosie and told him what was happening. In ten minutes Bosie pulled up in a white Porche coupe he’d borrowed from a salon lady. And I think they got to watch me get chauffeured off. Bosie got it.
I realized I’d been going on and on. I asked the boy in my bed, “Are you still awake?”
“Yes.”
“Then I was thinking about when I slept on the roof of Kinko’s, I told you about that, right? The guys on the night shift would do hella speed and stay up all night and play with the brand-new color copier and we’d either drink then roll up in blue tarps and sleep, or I’d head downstairs to see what the guys were doing, and if I could make zines out of my poetry journal, which I did. They taught me how to trick copy machines, skew copy numbers and once we even make a huge slingshot out of the ‘wait in line’ rope stands and Kinko’s rubber bands and Xacto blades and launch them into the offices.
“I was thinking about a piece of writing my friend James wrote about a night when after he had sex with his girlfriend she asked what he was thinking. And how he said that standing behind the register at Kinko’s every day made him feel idle, dead, and if he talked back to a client about the client being a dick how he might get reprimanded and then put his boss in a bad position, and how everyone goes through crap like that at a job. And that he’s just as bitter and powerless as the dickhead on the other side of the counter treating him like shit. And that how everyone feels so small and abstract in the whole big picture and that in a weird way you kinda get how religious fanatics choose their god because, while it’s a cosmic farce, it’s like having a lover who will never betray you, and otherwise you’d just suicide out of the whole fucking rat race because nothing lasts forever. And that there are no happy endings, or easy answers, or knowing if it’s even worth it when it comes to love. No one will ever be “mine”. But it’s all we’ve got unless we all just want to be afraid all the fucking time.
“Way back when the club Amnesia (on Valencia Street) used to be the Chameleon, there used to be spoken word nights, and I’d sometimes get up and read my writing from the streets. I had a fake ID.
“About five years after Kinko’s, James got tired of trying to kick heroin and threw himself in front of a train. He was such a brilliant writer. There was a lot of bad blood then between me and this group of girls — girls who wrote for Maximum Rock & Roll — because, well, I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the same as the women in SRL; they first loved and admire me, then they hated me, and maybe (actually certainly) at least one of them for some reason beyond my own perceptions of my self-destructive life — one of them wants to *be* me.
“Anyway, I was invited to read at the Chameleon for James’ tribute, and I hadn’t taken the stage in a long time. There was another girl, Kara, in the front row who I knew disliked me from way back on the streets, but I can’t remember why, except all I could think was that she was still big enough to beat me up.
“I started reading a piece James wrote ages ago, from my private archives, about James’ girlfriend asking him what he was thinking after sex. The bar quieted for me to begin, and when I started the MRR girls laughed loudly amongst themselves, heckled me, talked loudly when I started reading. It was hard, humiliating, and I was so sad and embarrassed about James I wanted to cry.
“Kara stood up and I stopped reading. She looked right at the MRR girls across the bar and said “Shut the FUCK up.” They did. Then, I read James’ entire piece about losing his soul, and it ended with his girlfriend telling him she loved him for being a long-winded, pretentious motherfucker: and after she’d said that, she kissed him.”
* * * * * * *
When I told this to the boy in my bed, I used everyone’s real names.
Fuck, my scars itch tonight. I miss being kissed. Kissed like blind fury.
