The Year of Yes

by Maria Headley

  “Lord of the Zipper-Flies.”

  “You’re funny, for an American. Which is to say, not very.” Baler paused to give me a grin that managed to radiate both charm and machismo. Dangerous.

  One of my girlfriends had, years before, been involved in a brief marriage to a Greek guy. She’d met him on a ship. He hadn’t spoken English, and she hadn’t spoken Greek. In all other aspects of her life, she was a very intelligent woman, but this man had won her, with absolutely no effort. “It was his arm hair and his ego,” she’d explained, sheepishly. “That was all I liked about him. Six wasted weeks.”

  “My prostitute was…shall we say…volatile,” said Baler, and put his hand on my knee. I could suddenly feel hormones conga-ing through my bloodstream. I shut my eyes. He was sexy, yes, but this was obviously not a good idea. Experience had taught me that if a man asked you to do something extreme this early on, it would only get worse. Men retained the scars of puberty. If something terrible happened to them between the ages of about twelve to fourteen, they tended to repeat versions of it ever after.

  For example. My friend Taylor had, at the age of twelve, accompanied his father, a vehement born-again Christian, to Vegas. It’d been a happy father-son trip into Sin City, and Taylor had been pleased to be considered mature enough to tag along. Until, as they walked down the street, Taylor’s dad had spotted a sequin-bedecked hooker.

  “Hang on a sec, son,” he’d said, and then grabbed the girl, pulled up her Lycra miniskirt, bent her over backward, and stuck his tongue down her throat. Taylor had watched, wide-eyed. His father had, at the time, still been married to his mother. Was this what normal people did? Taylor was uncertain. The experience had left Taylor with a confused fetish for women naked beneath their drugstore pantyhose. However, a fetish for hosiery was one thing. A fetish for having your penis chewed was another.

  “Did she bite you?” I asked Baler. “That’s awful. You were so young!”

  “You’re overreacting. It’s just something I like.”

  “You mean gently. You mean, like, run my teeth gently across it.”

  “No. I mean really bite it. The harder the better.”

  Part of me wanted to try it. I certainly had some rage I’d been holding in reserve. What woman didn’t? Just that morning, I’d overheard a tense sidewalk conversation in which a guy had been saying, “Why do you always have to emasculate me in public?”

  “Because I just can’t help myself,” his girlfriend had replied, resignation in her voice.

  Sometimes I felt the same way. I was pretty sure, though, that biting didn’t count as safe sex.

  It was like we’d gone back in time. In every high school, there’s that guy who wants you to punch him in the guts. It’s supposed to show you what a big, strong King Kong he is. You’re supposed to be Fay Wray. Invariably, it turns out more like Houdini. You punch him before he’s ready. He dies shortly thereafter, tangled in the chains he himself has requested. You are left trying to flatter him back to life. Usually this means you have to let him get to third base.

  I looked at Baler, and I wanted to drool. O, that stubble! O, that testosterone! O, those white teeth! A real man! But. What if he wanted to bite me? I didn’t want to be bitten. I could envision a very unhappy bedroom scenario, the whole thing disintegrating from art-film passion into a horror movie/denture commercial. Not sexy. Not sexy at all. I was confused.

  YES, I UNDERSTOOD THAT there was such a thing as masochism. As usual, though, everything I knew, I knew from reading. During my second week in New York, I’d run across a disturbing article about fetish spanking in the Village Voice. This was not the cutesy endeavor I’d assumed it to be. It apparently required a variety of props: schoolgirl attire, rulers, and the occasional tennis racquet. I’d been baffled.

  My grade school had had a public paddling policy. At least once a week, the entire student body was called into the cafeteria to watch a sinner being dragged forth. Sometimes the spankee would be tearful, sometimes defiant, but it didn’t matter. That paddle was coming down, and that bottom would be bare beneath that paddle, regardless of whether or not the perpetrator had actually meant malevolence when he was dribbling rubber cement down the pants of his female classmate. Watching spankings had been like watching an execution. The eros in the equation was not evident to me.

  It seemed, however, that most of New York City was fully cognizant of the pleasure/pain principle. Shortly after my education in spanking, Taylor had taken me shopping for clubwear. I’d been naïve. Clubwear, to me, meant nice clothing. Clubwear, to Taylor, meant a rubber suit. Taylor was emphatically straight, though anyone who saw him dressed in his usual party outfit of leather hot pants, roller skates, and a smile, would have thought differently. He was an actor and had a weakness for costumes. Luckily for him, his girlfriend, Janet, was an actor, too, and understood his yen to borrow her clothes.

  Taylor had led me into a cave deep in the West Village. The walls had been hung with various vinyl and latex items, buckles and bows, topless tops and bottomless bottoms. Taylor’d been in the dressing room, entangled in his rubber shirt, yowling as it yanked out his chest hairs, when I’d glanced toward a darkened back room and noticed a faint, appealing glow. I’d drifted toward it, entranced. What was it? A shrine, maybe, or one of those lights in which a plastic Jesus stands in the middle of fiber-optic stars. Or a lava lamp?

  Or a room entirely studded with glow-in-the-dark dildos.

  They’d protruded proudly from the plaster, like handgrips on a climbing wall. And they’d been large. Large enough to serve as baseball bat stand-ins in the event of an apartment burglary. Large enough to be labeled blue-ribbon zucchini in a roadside produce stand. Large enough to be trotted out on leashes, wearing clothing marketed for lapdogs. When I’d fled the dark room, I could’ve sworn I’d seen one of them bending to watch me go, like a periscope rising from a Russian submarine.

  “Taylor!” I’d whispered, peering into his dressing room, only to find him panting in exertion, his arms in knots over his head and his rubber shirt becoming a tourniquet.

  “I’m just taking a little break,” he’d replied.

  “Have you been in the other room?”

  “Why?”

  “There are big things all over the walls. I think we should leave. It’s creepy.”

  “You mean the dildos? Welcome to New York, baby!” He’d screamed as he’d torn the shirt the rest of the way off, and then looked down at his soon-to-be-denuded legs.

  “I’ll need your help with these pants,” he’d said, sorrowfully.

  “No pain, no gain,” he’d explained later, as we left the store, having purchased the depilatory suit. I was sure, though, that even Taylor would have balked at the idea of getting his private parts gnawed.

  “LIKE THIS?” I ASKED BALER, biting my pickle in half. He nodded.

  “I like a woman with strong jaws,” he said, and then put his hand up to feel mine.

  “Explain. How in the name of God can you like that?”

  He shook his head, woefully.

  “I really thought you were an open-minded girl,” he said. “But you’re…how do you say? A Puritan. It was nice to meet you, but it’ll never work. Always good to find out quickly, don’t you think?”

  “What’s the point of being with a person who can’t give you what you need?” I said. I agreed with him, at least on this subject. If the man needed to be bitten, he needed to be bitten. Who was I to stand in the way of his happiness? However, I was also adding some categories to my “never in a million years” list.

  “Have a good life, Maria,” Baler said, unlocking his racing bicycle from the rack, mounting it, and riding fearlessly into traffic. I could only speculate that all those years bound up in bike shorts had resulted in a lack of penile sensitivity. But really, I was completely dumbfounded.

  Could biting count as love? The last time I’d bitten someone, it’d been on the fourth grade playground, and it’d been about alienation. I’d bee
n unclear on the rules for the game called Chase, and therefore I’d had a grand old time sprinting around the playground, flinging myself wholesale upon the boys, and biting and pinching them until they’d begged for mercy. After a few recesses of this, a knot of tight-lipped girls had informed me that only boys were allowed to chase. Girls were supposed to run slowly, and then be thrown to the ground and kissed. Not bitten. Run slowly? I hadn’t cared for the contradiction. If I was running, I’d wanted to win, and who wanted to be kissed anyway? Disgusting. I’d kept playing Chase my way, even when it’d landed me in Special Ed for observation. Eventually, though, I’d gotten bored with pursuing a pack of screaming ninnies while the rest of the girls watched irritably from the jungle gym. I’d spent the rest of grade school bosom buddies with one outcast girl who wasn’t allowed to wear pants, and another whose family raised bull terriers in a double-wide trailer. Screw fitting in.

  My yes policy was getting a similar kind of response from my current female friends. They told me that what I was doing would mess up the balance of the universe. Women were supposed to say no, and men were supposed to chase them. When a woman finally said yes, it’d be such a big deal that trumpets would sound and men would fall down in gratitude. This balance felt like something out of Lysistrata, in which the women swore off sex in order to force their husbands to stop going to war. It made for amusing theater: a bunch of stammering actors staggering around, weighed down by four-foot phalluses, and a chorus of imperious women yelling “no!” But if that was what real life had to be, I was unimpressed. I didn’t like the thought that a woman’s only power was in her ability to deny. As for balance, it wasn’t like there were millions of joyful people populating the streets. It seemed like there were far more rejected and disappointed people. The more I said yes, the more I realized that I’d never wanted to play by the rules anyway. Why had I even tried? I wasn’t built that way.

  LATER THAT NIGHT, I ran the scenario by Zak and Griffin.

  “He asked you to bite him?” Griffin was aghast.

  “BITE?!” Zak was even more aghast.

  “Bite! Bite! Bite!” Griffin moaned. “Oh God. I’m going to throw up. You do know that’s abnormal, right?”

  “More than abnormal,” said Zak. “Insane. On a Marquis de Sade level. The guy needs to be locked up.”

  “He was an interesting guy. Maybe I should have done it.”

  “You could meet an interesting guy in the middle of the Sahara,” said Zak. “That’s nothing new.”

  “There you’d be, on your camel, and some guy would appear in the distance, asking you to kindly bite his penis,” said Griffin.

  “And she would,” said Zak. “That’s the thing about her. They’re not wrong.”

  “It’d depend,” I said.

  “On what, exactly?”

  “Whether or not I was thirsty.”

  There was a shout of horror from both Griffin and Zak. I went back to drinking my coffee mug of jug wine, and pretending that I wasn’t stressed out by the way things were going. What if only weirdos wanted me? Historically, that had certainly been true. Part of my heart, the part I was in denial of, suspected that no acceptable man would ever be interested. In Idaho, I’d been too fat, too brunette, too smart, and though there’d certainly been guys who’d chased me, most of them—with the exception of my first pseudo-boyfriend, Ira, with whom I continued to engage in drama—had been creepy. Ira, despite being somewhat acceptable, had met with my no policy for years. When he’d heard about my new yes policy, he was very excited, at least until I informed him that the yes he had in mind was not what I was practicing. Nevertheless, he still called me every couple of months, just to check.

  IRA WAS A SPECIAL KIND OF STRANGE: a sarcastic, belligerent comrade-enemy. He loved me, but throughout high school he’d also written a newspaper column for the sole purpose of mocking me. Our two columns were published on the same page, Ira going so far as to post a leering headshot that spoofed my smiling one. We’d been dueling clowns, and the attraction/repulsion of this dynamic explained why Ira had never officially been acknowledged as my boyfriend. We’d gone to two proms together, but we’d never even kissed.

  When I’d met Ira, I was in a blood-red velvet phase, and given to wearing a necklace made of a roach clip, which I’d inherited from my mother’s wild period. Having no idea what a roach clip actually was, and thinking cheery thoughts of Gregor Samsa’s cockroach transformation, I’d felt my roach clip gave me a Kafka-esque cool. Early on, Ira had informed me that I was the “freakiest thing” he’d ever seen, but that he liked the necklace. Ira was a flushed, freckled redhead who had been born looking like a forty-year-old Orson Welles. He’d had stubble from the age of nine, and he spoke in the howling bellow of an accordion. I’d met him sophomore year of high school. He was a transfer student, and he’d made his situation even more wretched by tumbling off the stage on the first day of drama class. I’d taken pity on him. A few days later, I’d brought him home to meet my family.

  My mom had gone pale when Ira had shambled in, grinning and twisting a lock of his long red hair. She’d grabbed me by the arm, pulled me into the pantry, and whispered, “You can’t date him.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s a dog. You have to trust me. I know some things, and this is one of them.”

  “He’s not a dog. He’s Ira.”

  “He’s a dachshund,” she’d said, vehemently. “A redheaded dachshund.”

  Okay. Whatever. Ira had neither been short-legged nor particularly long in the torso. I’d figured that my mom, somewhat kooky already (we all were), had just been exhibiting a repressed rage against men in general, but then at dinner she’d seen fit to tell a certain story. As follows.

  ONCE UPON A TIME, in the 1970s, when my mom was twenty-one, she was living happily in a haunted A-frame in the Oregon woods with her dog Buddha, an enormous Great Dane-wolf-Labrador mix. Buddha was the size of a horse, but very charming and a good protector. My mom lived with the ghost, two cats, and Buddha in relative harmony, despite occasional paranormal episodes.

  Until one fateful day.

  My mom was driving home from a trip to the grocery store when she suddenly heard the sounds of violent car sickness coming from the backseat. Freaked out, she pulled her maroon Datsun over to the side of the road and opened the back door. There, in the middle of a half-eaten flat of strawberries, was a puking dachshund. The dog had apparently snuck into the car as she’d been loading her groceries. He had no collar, but the scraggly pink bows on each ear told her that he was an escaped lapdog. A refugee, thought my mom, taking pity on the fugitive.

  “What’s your name?” she asked the dog.

  “I-Rah!” the dog yipped. “I-Rah! I-Rah! I-Raaaaaaah!”

  “Hello, Ira. It’s very nice to meet you,” my mom said, and brought him home.

  Though she posted flyers, no one claimed ownership of Ira. The reason for this soon became clear. Ira was a demon masquerading as a dachshund. The moment he skittered into the A-frame, his fur stood on end, and his long ears stuck out from his head like coffin planks. He raced hysterically across the wood floors, chasing the ghost, which, offended, began a campaign of malicious acts. Ira never slept. His eyes rolled wildly in his head, and he panted rabidly, charging through the house twenty-four hours a day, shrieking his war cry: “I-Rah! I-Rah! I-Rah! I-RAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!”

  Shortly after Ira moved in, both cats moved out. Soon, Buddha started running miserably through the house, too, Ira nipping in pursuit. My mom was reduced to a completely sleepless existence, listening to dog cries, searching the house for Ira, and finding him snarling in corners, teeth bared. She had thought the ghost was benevolent, but Ira gave her the impression that it was a murderous wraith. She was terrified, and spent most of her time cringing in her bed, hiding under the covers as Ira trembled and screamed his way through the house, and the ghost spilled milk and banged pots and pans in the kitchen.

  After six months of living in complete stress
, my mom was near a nervous breakdown. She decided that, in order to survive, she would have to get rid of Ira. She couldn’t give him to the Portland pound, because they’d euthanize him. She didn’t want that to happen. She just wanted Ira to move out. He was not her dog. He was a hitchhiker who wouldn’t leave. She brushed Ira’s fur and gave him new pink ear bows. She coaxed him into the Datsun. They drove to a park in a fancy neighborhood. Mansion windows looked down onto the manicured greens. It was exactly the right place for a sweet, pampered little dachshund to find a new owner. My mom put Ira down in the middle of the grass.

  “I-Rah!” he commented.

  “I’m very sorry about this, Ira, but you and I are not a good match. I know you’ll find a happy home,” said my mom, and then she sprinted to her car. The last time she saw Ira, he was lifting his leg at a rosebush. When she got home, the ghost and Buddha were peaceable again. The cats moved back in. Everything was happily ever after, at least for another couple of years, until she met my dad.

  My mom never saw Ira again. That is, not until twenty years later, when I brought him home with me.

  “I don’t mean to act weird around you,” my mom told human Ira. “But wouldn’t you act weird if a reincarnated dachshund came home with your daughter?” She paused, a look of revelation on her face.

  “I just realized something. That’s why you like that old necklace. You liked it in 1972, too. You liked to chew it. You also liked to chew the roaches.”

  My dad became suddenly engaged, and directed a threatening glare at Ira. I could date a dachshund, apparently, but not a pothead.

  “You abandoned me in a park?” Ira asked, stunned.

  “I’m very sorry,” said my mom, “but I’m sure you found a nice family.”

  “You put pink bows on my ears?”

  “I thought you’d appeal to a little girl.”

  “I need a minute,” said Ira, and left the room to hyperventilate.