by Amy Dresner
Dajarie came over to me.
“Why you sittin’ in the back, sugarplum?”
“Because I’m scared.”
“Well, be scared in the front.”
Fuck. I moved to the front, all long bangs and sad dog eyes, scratching where the stitches had been on my head.
Black lesbians get very involved in their meetings. There were lots of random shoutings of “That’s right!” “Get it, girl!” and “God is good!” It felt like what I’d imagine a revival church would be like, but I’m a Jew, so what the hell do I know.
An enormous black woman with a shaved head came up to the podium to share. “I like them hard chairs,” she opened with. “They remind me of prison.”
Okaaay…
One day, I was at one of those horrible Brentwood bitch meetings, and in walked a cute dark-haired guy with glasses and tattoos.
“Excuse me, but this is an all-women’s meeting,” said one of the tight-faced housewives.
“I am a woman,” she answered, taking a seat.
Huh? Turned out her name was Lori, and she was a butch dyke who had recently gotten out of prison. She had a flat chest from a double mastectomy due to breast cancer and was two years clean from a really, really bad heroin habit. Cancer and her heroin addiction coincided for a while. In fact, back when she was undergoing chemo, she shot dope into her chemo ports. Now, that’s some junkie dedication.
Lori looked so much like a man that strangers she encountered called her “sir.” When she walked out of a women’s public restroom, other women would do a double take and check the “ladies” sign on the door. When she used to work out at Bally’s, a security guard once came into the women’s dressing room to remove her because somebody complained that there was a man in there.
I am not gay, but I was instantly and bizarrely infatuated with Lori. She wore these big Buddy Holly glasses that framed gray-blue eyes, and her face was covered in freckles. She was this amazing combination of all the best traits of a female best friend and all the machismo and chivalry of a man. She was like “guy lite.” She could fix your car and then stay up all night with you eating ice cream and talking about feelings.
When you’re newly sober, you are looking for any distractions from your feelings, and sex and romance are very effective ones. After years of numbing out with booze and drugs, suddenly experiencing my raw emotions, with nothing to take the edge off, felt uncomfortably intense. Granted, some people in early sobriety describe having what’s called a “pink cloud,” where they feel deliriously happy and optimistic. But I’ve never experienced this pink cloud—or had a pink anything, for that matter. For me, getting sober always feels like getting woken up military style: suddenly, at the crack of dawn, with rows of blinding fluorescent lights and a bugle blowing in your face.
As I said, Dajarie was only letting me go to women’s meetings and gay meetings so I wouldn’t fuck my way through this sobriety. Add to that that the majority of my sponsee sisters (my sponsor’s other sponsees) were lesbians. This left me the lone straight girl in this sober gay family. I was the minority. And I felt like the outcast and the weirdo, and I desperately wanted to fit in. My romantic life with men had been a fucking train wreck so I thought, hey, maybe girls are the answer!
So I started watching The L Word religiously. I became convinced that Lori would fall in love with me. We’d move to San Francisco and get a house with dogs and wear backpacks or whatever lesbian couples do. I had it all planned out.
Dajarie was also Lori’s sponsor. One night, after some intolerable sponsee dinner in the hood, I drove Lori home. I was wearing the most lesbo clothes I could find: a ripped-up, studded Iron Maiden T-shirt, a leather jacket, black jeans, and boots. When we got to her house, I turned off the car and looked at her.
“I have to tell you something,” I confessed, shyly putting my face in my hands.
“Okay.”
“I have a crush on you, and I’m not even gay,” I said.
“Maybe it’s because I look like a guy,” she offered.
“I’ve had a dream about you every night since we met. It’s kind of freaking me out. I don’t want to be gay.”
“Gay is not the worst thing in the world, Amy,” she reassured me.
“I mean it would be better if you had a penis, but we can work around that,” I said bluntly.
“That’s very kind of you.”
“I wanted to kiss you the other night, and I’ve even jacked off thinking about you.”
“I think that’s kind of hot,” she said, with a half smile. “Listen, I… I… I’m flattered…”
“Flattered? Flattered?!” I said, astonished. “You should be fucking flattered. All the boys in AA wanna fuck me!” Oh, lord, here I go…
“Look, Amy… you’re newly sober, and you just bumped your head. This is a very vulnerable time for you. And I don’t jump into anything. My sobriety is everything. Let’s just hang out and get to know each other.”
“God, that sounds condescending.”
“It’s not meant to sound condescending. Your sobriety is the number one priority. You are attractive and funny and smart, but you’re also a newcomer, and that’s a sanctity I can’t violate.”
“Just you saying the word ‘violate’ turns me on,” I said coyly.
“One day, when you tell your story, you can say that you bumped your head and when you woke up, you were a lesbian!”
I was silent.
“Come on,” she said. “Smile… that was funny.”
“I’m not a fucking lesbian. It’s just you. You’re a fluke.”
As I drove home, it occurred to me that maybe lesbians have more willpower than men. Or… maybe I have less pull in the gay world? No guy in AA ever had so much respect for my vulnerability and sobriety that he wouldn’t fuck me when I was a newcomer. Guys don’t even have to like you to fuck you. You could have a wood eye or a peg leg, or be their best friend’s girlfriend or be passed out, and they’d flip you over and stick it in.
I confessed my crush to one of my gay “sober sisters.”
“She’s a lesbian, Amy, not just a nice-smelling man with a better manicure. She’s gay. It’s different.”
I tell Dajarie that I’m crushing out on Lori.
“Baby, you too ill to be involved with anybody—man or woman,” she says without hesitation.
Lori and I agree to be “friends.” There was an unspoken pact that conversation will be limited to topics with no romantic charge: sobriety, Tori Amos songs, burritos, whatever. We never speak about my “confession.”
Lori didn’t have a car. She was broke and lived in a small, shitty room she rented in some lady’s house in the scariest part of Culver City. It’s tough to land a job as an ex-con, so Lori, who was almost fifty, worked construction with a bunch of twenty-year-old Latino guys. Welcome to the freedom that is post-prison life.
I ended up chauffeuring her everywhere. I pretended that I was “being of service” as they say (and encourage) in AA, but I was really just desperate to be around her.
One day, she was in agony—having really bad chest pains.
“I’ll take you to the ER.”
“Just drop me off. I can take the bus home. I don’t want to make you wait.”
“Holy shit, your martyrdom is annoying,” I snapped. “God forbid you should let anybody do anything for you.”
“No… it’s just that I like to do the giving,” she said. “Because I like to be in control.”
“You can receive and still be in control. I’m the queen of it. I actually teach a course,” I cackled—my new scary head injury laugh.
I drove her back to her house, and we sat in the driveway chatting. She showed me photos from prison: one of her at fire camp (firefighting training in prison) and pictures of her twin sister, her old girlfriend, her best friend. One photo she quickly extracted from the pile and stuck in her pocket.
“What’s that one?” I said.
“Nothing,” she said.
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“I want to see that one.”
“It’s nothing.”
“Tell me why you don’t want me to see it, and I’ll stop pestering you.”
“Because I don’t.”
“Fine.”
As she was putting all the photos away, I caught a glimpse of the one she’d hidden. It was a picture of her—young, maybe early twenties, topless, on a horse. She had nice tits—nice tits that had been replaced by flat, aggressive scars.
She blurted out, “I don’t mess around with straight girls. They don’t know their sexual orientation. It’s messy. I’ve been a lesbian my whole life. I had a girlfriend where I was her first lesbian relationship. Even after five years, she hadn’t introduced me to her parents. She was afraid they’d disinherit her.”
“I get it,” I said, trying to end the conversation.
“Well, eventually you’ll meet a nice guy…”
I stopped listening. Her voice trailed off as I stared at her freckles and her mouth that revealed her chipped teeth when she smiled.
A few days later, she took me by total surprise by walking into a meeting she never attended—one that I’d gone to expressly for that reason. I was shaken. I felt a physical lurching toward her. I looked longingly at her tan, muscular, hairless legs with their pretty swirling tribal tattoos. I played with my hair and posed my hands, trying to get her attention. Nothing. She was not even remotely interested in me, and I felt a deep rage rising.
Later that night I called Dajarie.
“I can’t hang out with Lori. Honestly, I can’t even see her at meetings,” I admitted.
“I knew you would not be able to handle being Lori’s friend. It’s like trying to break up with somebody while still living with them.”
“Can I skip all our regular meetings for a while, especially the Crenshaw one?”
“Okay, baby. But you need to tell Lori what’s up and tell her no more contact.”
I got Lori on the phone. “Listen… I’m, like, in love with you or something. I can’t handle it. I can’t hang out with you right now.”
“What? I thought we were cool.”
“No. I think you’re fucking magical. You can fix cars, and you look like a dude, but you can talk about feelings and sad songs and stuff. It’s rad.”
“Well, women are really amazing, Amy. And there are plenty of us out here.”
“No!” I scream into the phone—like a two-year-old. “I want you!”
“Well, having a relationship is not my priority right now. My recovery is. I don’t want to end up losing my shit and living under a bush again. And… I don’t think that’s what our connection is about.”
“How do you know?” I whined into the phone.
“I just know.”
“But how?” I demanded. “Is it because I’m too crazy and broken?”
“Yeah, you are pretty crazy right now. I mean, there’s some really cool stuff about you, but when you have these little tantrums, it’s kind of scary…”
I broke into hysterical, heaving sobs. “You are withholding—just like every guy I’ve ever picked!”
“I’m not withholding. I have nothing to give.”
“Same difference! That girl you were in love with for sixteen months… she crawls into your bed… you’re a horny parolee… you haven’t been with anybody for, what five years… and you do nothing. You don’t even kiss her! What are you so afraid of?”
“She had a boyfriend,” she said. “It would have been wrong.”
“Wrong? Wrong? You shot heroin into your chemotherapy ports! You robbed houses and ended up in prison! Since when have you cared about ‘wrong’?”
I lit a cigarette and changed ears. “I thought there was a charge between us,” I continued. “It felt relationshippy.”
“Haven’t you had friendships with girls?” she asked. “They are kind of relationshippy.”
“Yeah, I’ve had close girlfriends. I’ve even had girlfriends I made out with, and it didn’t feel like this,” I said.
“We will be friends down the road, Amy. You’ll see. We will laugh about this one day.”
I was silent.
“Hello…?” she said.
“Fuck. You,” I said softly. And I hung up on her.
A month or so went by, and then Dajarie told me I needed to go back to the Crenshaw meeting.
“You can’t avoid her forever, baby,” she said.
I put on some jeans and tucked them into tall suede boots, threw on a crew-neck T-shirt that said “Perfect Angel” (yeah, right), a dark purple rabbit bomber jacket, and a long, thin scarf. I was dressing to impress Lori, going for seventies rock star. Unfortunately, by the time I pulled up at the meeting, I realized I looked more thirties aviator. Oh, well. I walked into the room, and I saw Lori in the far left, her arm draped over the back of an empty chair. I tried not to look at her.
After the meeting, I joined all the lesbians smoking and chatting out on the lawn. Lori shuffled over, little lesbian knapsack draped diagonally across her sunken chest, snaggle-toothed smile, aqua-blue soulful eyes darting nervously behind glasses that hid nothing.
“How are youuuu?” she asked, in the tone you might use on somebody developmentally disabled.
To my surprise and dismay, I just hauled off and punched her. Hard. In the shoulder. I was shocked. She looked mildly astonished and walked away. I started crying hysterically. Needless to say, we didn’t speak for a while after that.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I tune my car radio to HOT 92.3. It’s my favorite station these days: all late seventies jams. It reminds me of my days as a young’un, roller skating at Flippers, dreams and hopes still intact. I dance around badly in the driver’s seat, sucking violently on my e-cig, driving down the quiet, empty, early morning streets of Hollywood.
One guy who winds up on my crew this morning is a young, black, aspiring R & B singer. While we’re working, he sings the same two verses of his crappy song for four hours straight. He finally stops, but only because he passes out from exhaustion.
When he wakes up, he says, “Shit, maaaan. I forget how my song went now. How’d it go again? You remember, girl?”
“I don’t, dude. Sorry.”
Another new face is an Armenian security guard who got arrested for “disturbing the peace”—with his gun. I don’t even wanna know.
There are only a few regulars. Everybody else I see sporadically or just once and then never again. One of the regulars is a tiny black woman who looks exactly like the comedian Katt Williams. She rides a bicycle and does not shut the fuck up. Another is an old Russian guy with surgical rods in his back. Obviously an alcoholic, he has had an astounding six DUIs and has that red bulbous W. C. Fields nose that only real hard-core drunks get. He is very quiet and works harder than anybody else on the crew, despite not being able to bend over.
A rabid old man passing us with a shopping cart mumbles something about the New Testament and Jack in the Box. I couldn’t hear what he said so I stupidly say, “Excuse me?”
“You heard me!” he screams, and then starts spitting at me. “Evil bitch! Demon! Jesus said…”
I clutch my dustpan and broom and do a quick shuffle up the street, heart racing.
PING! A text from Linda. I look around and then slyly pull my phone out. She has sent me a picture of a purse. “Do you like this Givenchy Pandora handbag for me? It’s on sale at the RealReal.”
I quickly text back: “Sorry, I’m being spat at by a homeless lunatic while I sweep up trash. Can I look later or is it pressing?”
“Whore.”
“Faggot.”
I hear the crew boss whistle at me and then yell, “Apaga ese pinche teléfono, guera!”
“Okay okay!” I put my phone away.
It was the Fourth of July, 2009, and I’d later joke that I was still so torn up by the split between America and England that I just couldn’t take it anymore. But, at the time, there was nothing funny or patriotic about it.
> I was performing regularly as a comic and getting good reviews. I had a sponsor, four sponsees, a few years sober. But I still felt a deep despair. I had been insecure about the way I looked at twenty; and pushing forty at the time, I could only imagine how my slow physical decline would impact my already fragile self-esteem.
I hated myself and worried that my husband, Clay, hated me, too. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t muster the kind of love for him that he felt for me. As the marriage went on, the disparity became obvious. There were other surprises, too. Being married didn’t feel like security to me. It felt like prison.
The two of us waged a silent war. The territory was the marital bed. He wanted to make love, and I wanted to get fucked. He wanted to connect, and I wanted to check out.
I remember the very first time I spent the night at Clay’s, years before, when we were first dating. He turned to me in bed and said, “I’m really glad you’re here.”
“Me too,” I answered. “Because you have central air.” In my defense, it was a scalding L.A. summer, and I lived in a 1930s apartment with no AC. But it was a horrible thing to say. And, ultimately, this remark was a model for our marriage: he was in love, and I was in need. I did eventually grow to really love him, but by then, it was too late, and the damage had been done.
So Clay and I were fighting. Again. If you really want to hurt someone, just tell them the truth. No need to insult them. Just say that thing that they know but hide from themselves: the thing that they drink over, the thing that jolts them awake at three a.m., the thing that they look to disprove in every lover’s eyes.
I don’t remember exactly what he said, but I do remember the feeling, like my insides were breaking. It had all become clear. I was a fake. I was surrounded by sycophants. I was getting old. And my marriage was a fraud.
