“You have a buck?” she asked.
I did have a buck, but I didn’t want to just give it away.
“What do I get if I give you a buck?” I asked. She shrugged before she spoke.
“I work on Forty-second Street, you could give me a ride there on your bike and I could show you something.” I thought about it. I had errands to run. I had to stop on Waverly Place and then 42nd Street.
“If you want to run my errands with me you could tag along,” I said.
I amazed myself with how agreeable I was being. I was a stone-cold butch dyke and I made no apologies for it. I didn’t need some cute femme to come along and fuck up my shit.
“Get on,” I said and she did. I gave her my helmet which was too big for her tiny head and we rode on into the night. Well, actually it wasn’t the night. It was midday, but riding off into the night sounds better so for this purpose we’ll say it was the night.
I did my drop-offs and pickups and then we flew down Sixth Avenue and onto 42nd Street until we reached the Kitten Inn.
Beatrice walked in and I followed her, past a mean-looking bouncer with enormous snake tattoos across his arms, and into the dressing room. She put on these shiny red platform heels and a big blonde wig that made her look like Dolly Parton without the huge breasts.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Ian,” I said.
“That’s a boy’s name,” she answered.
“No,” I said. “It’s my name.” I think she understood.
“I’m Beatrice,” she said. “But here, I’m Venus.”
I looked up at her as she slipped into a rhinestone thong and bra. Her arm had a giant heart tattoo on it. I grabbed a sharpie out of my pocket and wrote my name inside of it. “Now, you’re mine.” I said. She smiled and nodded. Her two front teeth were crooked like swans’ necks. It made her look even prettier. She smacked her lips together and applied vampire-red lipstick to them. She walked over to me, reached down my pants and sighed. She had found it, the softee. Okay, so it’s not mine and maybe I do have a Napoleon complex but it was necessary to maintain a sense of power which only the softee could provide.
“Sorry, it’s not hard,” I said. “I wish it was but I left that one at home. I didn’t plan on meeting you today.”
“It’s okay.”
An older woman came over and nudged Beatrice’s shoulders. “Venus, you’re on in four,” she said. The woman was thick and fat like a cheeseburger. Her eyes were lined in kohl and she was wearing very unflattering giant fake eyelashes.
When Beatrice went out into the box, I decided to leave. The box was impersonal, clear with a bubble machine inside that blew tiny bubbles into the girls’ hair as they danced around. The windows in the box were two-way so they could see out, could watch who was watching them.
Sadie always waited for me, on the bench smack-dab in the middle of Washington Square Park. Her blonde wig sometimes sat crookedly on her head but she was beautiful. There was no way around that. Her ample thighs and voluptuous breasts made her more woman than most actual women. She opened up her red patent leather purse and pulled out a heart-shaped flask, took a long swig and held it out to me.
“It’ll do you good,” she said as she lit a Gauloise. Sadie would only smoke French cigarettes. “Live like the French, die like the French,” she’d say. They were hard to get. There was a tiny tobacco shop on Madison Avenue that had them, but whenever Sadie walked the blocks between Park Avenue and Madison Avenue it was always like a scene from Pretty Woman. “I’m just waiting for them to tell me I can’t shop here,” she’d say.
Sadie sighed; her dress was made out of that bizarre hologram material and had tiny comic book characters saying racy things like, Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity. It glimmered under the streetlight.
“You know what I want more than anything?” Sadie began.
I shrugged.
“I want a sugar daddy to take me shopping. I saw this show on television. It tells you how to be a gold digger. See, you have a guy take you out to eat near a store you like. Then you walk by the shop and say, ‘God I love that dress, but I could never afford it.’ When he offers to buy it for you, which he inevitably will as this is a test to see how much of a man—a provider—he is, you have to say, ‘You can’t buy that for me, it’s way too expensive.’ Then of course he buys the dress. It’s all a big game,” she said before laughing so hard it caused her to make this terribly guttural cough.
It was getting late. I decided I should probably try to pick Beatrice up from work, so I kissed Sadie’s cold cheek and got back on my bicycle.
The door guy took my three dollar entrance fee, and I walked down the dark corridor. The place was made to make its patrons feel smarmy and perverted. The passageway led to the booths. There was a plump Italian-looking girl bending over in her box, thrusting and shaking like a robotic doll. I tossed a dollar through the crack in the window. She smiled and came toward me, blew me a kiss and proceeded to spread her legs. I asked her if Beatrice was here but she shrugged as if she couldn’t hear me. I grabbed a receipt from my bag and wrote Is Venus here? on it. She pointed to the dressing room.
I knocked on the door and a high-pitched voice said, “Just a minute.” The door swung open and a young-looking girl in cutoff shorts stared blankly at me.
“Is Venus here?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she replied. “Come in and look around if you want.”
The vanity mirror with the big fluorescent lights stung my eyes. There was a tiny blue piece of paper tucked into its corner. I picked it up. The letters were written in perfect cursive. The kind of handwriting you thought only French girls had. It said: Ian. Come meet me in Union Square on the steps facing 14th Street.
I got back on my bike and pedaled hard and fast. I was going to be late. I sped through intersections and some taxicab driver screamed, “Watch out you fucking dyke!” but I didn’t care. For once I wasn’t thinking about Molly. I was thinking about Beatrice. The park was quiet and dead. There was a homeless guy asleep on the bench but other than that it was completely silent. I walked to the steps and saw her. Her back was turned to me but her black bob made her look like a 1920s film star. She was drinking a 40 from a crumpled paper bag. I held in that moment for a second before approaching her. When she saw me she looked up and held out the 40 to me. I took a sip. It was slightly warm and tasted like piss but I was nervous and it helped.
“So how come you wanted me to meet you here?” I asked.
“Well…” she said, pulling out a wad of dollar bills. “Do you think this is enough to take a plane?”
I took another sip of beer.
“A plane to where?” I asked.
“To France?” she asked.
“Probably not,” I answered. I felt bad disappointing her like that.
She closed her eyes then opened them looking me dead-on. She had such cartoonish blue eyes like Betty Boop or something and her lips were so small and pouty, like if she asked she could have whatever she wanted. No one could say no to her.
“Je suis morte parce que je ne ressens pas de désir. Le désir me manque parce que je pense posséder. Je pense posséder parce que je n’essaie meme pas de donner. Lorsqu’on essaie de donner, on se rend compte que l’on a rien. Comme on a rien, on essaie de donner de soi, et alors on se rend compte que l’on n’est rien. Quand on est rien, on désire devenir. C’est à ce moment là que l’on commence à vivre” she said. “It’s broken French, but I will tell you what it means. ‘I am dead because I lack desire. I lack desire because I think I possess. I think I possess because I do not try to give. In trying to give, you see that you have nothing. Seeing that you have nothing, you try to give of yourself. Trying to give of yourself, you see that you are nothing. Seeing that you are nothing, you desire to become. In desiring to become, you begin to live.’”
I smiled.
“I’m waiting for my boyfriend—I mean my ex-boyfriend—here. He owes me
money.”
The thought of Beatrice’s ex-boyfriend made me nervous. I chugged her beer as if it were mine.
“I’ll pay you back for this,” I said.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“So where did you learn all that French?” I asked.
“I used to live in Paris. I was a maid for this wealthy family.”
First I saw the lights, then I saw the shiny wheels. He pulled up on his motorcycle like some evil spirit from the crypt. He was a heavily tattooed white boy. The kind of person I hated most. They reeked of privilege and they were always the first to throw down. They’d say they’d never hit a girl but I wasn’t a girl to them. I was some kind of genetic mutation, a fucked-up Y chromosome. He walked right up to Beatrice without a trace of hesitation. He put his thumb on her chin and moved in, kissed her like a snake. I could smell the disgusting mix of beer and his saliva. He hadn’t noticed me yet. It was a good sign or so I thought.
“So where’s my money?” she demanded. Her voice had changed. It wasn’t the sweet paper-thin voice I remembered. This voice was loud, sharp and bossy.
“I got it, baby. It’s right here.” He moved her hand toward his package. I cringed. She slapped him across the face, hard. I knew shit was going down and I wanted to get the fuck out of there but I was frozen. It was as if someone had hit the PAUSE button.
“Oh,” he said. “So it’s like that, huh?”
Beatrice spit hard on the ground and stamped out her cigarette. He grabbed her by her perfect black hair and held her down.
“So you think you can talk to me like that, huh?” He was very close to her face. I was terrified for her.
“If you want your money, you’ll have to get it yourself you stupid cunt.”
He looked over at me. “And who’s this?”
Beatrice let out a tiny shriek. “Don’t touch Ian,” she screamed. He hadn’t let go of Beatrice yet but he was staring me down.
“What are you going to do about it?” he asked me.
I had a blade in my pocket and if I wasn’t stuck on PAUSE I’d grab it and rip this motherfucker to shreds. I somehow found the strength to reach into my pocket and grab the blade. I lifted it up so he could see it.
“Oh, you think you’re a tough guy, huh?” he said.
“Ian, don’t…just don’t, okay…?” Beatrice screamed. I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to listen. I wasn’t going to die over this. He turned to look at Beatrice, stroked her shiny hair and breathed in her face.
“You really are a little money-grubbing bitch,” he said. I was ready. I came at him full force, held the knife up to his big thick neck. He laughed.
“You wouldn’t hurt me,” he said. “Uh-oh Bea, your little dyke boyfriend’s sticking up for you. How sweet.”
I was ready to fuck this guy up but it was too late. He’d knocked me onto the ground and I took some pretty mean punches. My lip was bleeding and my eye was definitely black.
I don’t remember what happened next except that when I came to Beatrice was there and my head was on her lap. We were still in Union Square and the sun was just barely peeking through the trees.
“Are you okay, Ian?” she asked.
I nodded but my neck felt like it had been struck by a hammer and my eyes stung.
“You took a fucking beating,” Beatrice said.
“Yeah, well I’m not going to run with your crowd anymore,” I said.
I biked home hard and fast. My legs felt twisted and my bones ached. My face felt like it’d been smashed to pieces. I carried my bike up the five stories to the apartment. I unlocked the door to find Sadie sitting in her favorite spot. She calls it “the parlor.” She says it sounds very Southern and sophisticated. She was polishing her toenails, her leg hiked up onto the table, wearing pink spandex leggings and a Siouxsie and the Banshees T-shirt that she had cut and tailored into a halter top.
“Damn, Ian, you look like a fucking car wreck. What the fuck happened to you?”
I mumbled about some fucking asshole trying to kill me but my face hurt too much for me to raise my voice.
Sadie walked over to the freezer and pulled out a bag of frozen peas and placed it on my left eye.
“Thanks.”
Sadie laughed. “I used to get to black eyes all the time when I lived in Harlem. Guys used to think I was a girl. I guess I passed and when they reached down my skirt, they realized I wasn’t. Once they know you’re a guy, all bets are off. So, they’d never hit a girl, but I guess I’m not a girl to them.”
“Yeah, me neither,” I said.
“So what are you doing today? You can’t work like that can you?”
I sighed, slipping out of my jeans and down to my boxer briefs.
“God, even your legs are tore up.”
I nodded. The sunlight was seeping through the drapes, making shadows across Sadie’s heavily painted face. When Sadie and I went out together people sometimes thought we were a couple, boyfriend and girlfriend. We liked that, because it meant we were passing. The man at the deli would say, “Sir, you’re lucky to have such a beautiful woman in your life. Treat her right.” I’d smile and say, “Of course, man. Of course.”
There was a knock at the door. I walked over to my bed and hoped Sadie would get it.
“Hello,” I heard Sadie shout through the peephole.
It was J.T. J.T. lived on the floor below us with his butch dyke girlfriend. We called him J.T. because he was young-looking and he reminded us of Jonathan Taylor Thomas from that show “Home Improvement.”
“What do you want now, mister?” Sadie asked. I could smell J.T. from my bed. He smelled of beer and dirt and sometimes urine. He was always scratching like the sick junkie he was. Not a heroin user but a T addict. T is pure poison if you don’t get it from someplace reputable. J.T. bought his on the street. There was a man called Doc who’d come around and you could buy a vial of what he said was testosterone for twenty bucks a pop. It was T all right but that wasn’t all it was. It was street T, probably cut with Drano or some other sick shit, and the needles were never clean. You could count on that.
“You got a couple of bucks?” J.T. asked Sadie.
“I thought you’d come to ask for a cup of sugar. I don’t have a couple of bucks,” she said.
J.T. stormed through the apartment to my room where I was lying in the dim light. “Got a couple of bucks, Ian?” he asked. “Rent’s due this week.”
I sighed. “You don’t want rent money. Fucking be honest with me. Say ‘I want to buy some fucking junk for my arm,’” I answered.
J.T. scoured the room, found my jeans that had been tossed on the floor and dug through the pockets.
“What the fuck are you doing? I didn’t say you could go through my shit.”
He had found my wallet and was skimming through its contents. There was exactly two bucks in there.
“You got two bucks,” he said. “I’m gonna borrow it. ’Kay?”
It was a rhetorical question. He already had taken the money. “Hey, dude, what happened to your face?”
“I’m trying to get some sleep, J.T. You got the money so just get out of here, okay?”
He stormed out the door and was gone. I thought about Molly, how she was probably married with one and a half kids by now. She never thought about that dyke from high school who was still so fucking stuck on her. She thought about white picket fences and playdates and PTA meetings. It was all pretty sad really. I thought about my five-year high school reunion. Was I going to go? I had wanted to but now the possibility of ever having anything with Molly was gone. What was the point? I could go and stare at her, shake her husband’s hand, maybe even have a man-to-man talk with him about cars or the price of oil but what would be the point?
I woke up at five thirty. It was raining outside. Sadie was watching “Soul Train” on the television and dancing around. She was wearing her Roller Derby outfit with the white roller skates that had pink and gold hearts on the sides. I was thinking about Beatr
ice. I was thinking about trying to find her.
“Wanna take a walk?” I asked Sadie.
“I can’t,” she squealed. “It’s raining. I’ll melt like the Wicked Witch of the West.”
I got dressed and grabbed my bicycle. I walked downstairs and headed down to 42nd Street.
The club was packed. Men were getting out of their Wall Street jobs feeling lonely and horny. I walked straight to the dressing room and banged on the door. The young-looking girl appeared again.
“Looking for Venus?”
“Yeah.”
“She’s not working. She’s got fines now. She’ll have to pay Dottie a hundred bucks if she wants to work again.”
“Do you know where to find her?” I asked.
“We got information sheets with addresses and phone numbers but most of the girls lie on them. I know I did.” The older woman from the other night put her fat hand on my shoulder. It felt heavy. I was still sore.
“She lives on Bleeker Street, number eleven-sixty-six,” said the lady. “If you see her, tell her to come in to work.” I nodded.
I rode off into the rain. My hair was soaking and my shoes squeaked at each turn of the pedal. When I arrived I walked up the front steps and hit her buzzer. No one answered. I buzzed again. Still no one. I walked out the door, sat on the stairs underneath the overhang. I reached into my pocket. Her number was there but it was smudged by the rain so I couldn’t make it out. I knew the first three numbers were 4-1-7. That’s all I knew.
I waited about an hour, and just as I was standing up, about to mount my bicycle, she appeared. She sort of floated like above the water. Her eyes were so clear, her hair was so wet. Her red bra strap peaked out from underneath her white T-shirt. She kinda just stood there for a minute, looking me over, making sure it was really me.
Best Lesbian Erotica 2007 Page 9
