Let me tell you about now. Now means not being in San Francisco—now means being stuck in Massachusetts. Now means that the only dykes for miles are earnest, just-out baby gays, and Lola and I both prefer women who are older and tougher. I wish I could tell you Lola’s real name, because it’s so perfect for a dyke like her, but I can’t. So I’m calling her Lola instead, because that’s almost as good. “What did my parents think I’d grow up to be?” she asked me once, exasperated. “I mean, they named me. If you call your baby Lola, and then you’re shocked when she looks like a lesbian prostitute, you’ve got some problems with reality!” Lola is skinny and doe-eyed, with a snarly grin. She wears baggy cargo pants with lacy bras and camisoles, tall boots, and a leather jacket, and she always looks flawless doing it. I’m round and short; I do femme in a more vintage, little-girly way—lots of fifties-style dresses and bright colors—but I’m no less cute than her.
Now is just a bad time for us and sex. Now means we’ve either exhausted or eschewed all the dyke possibilities in this town, and we are both aching for San Francisco, for a time when sex was good and whole and widely available to both of us. Now means that we drive around the backwoods of Western Massachusetts late at night, blasting Patti Smith on Lola’s car stereo and drinking coffee and soda, being really fucking sad and fantasizing about how the butches in San Francisco will sweep us off our feet.
Never mind that in six months I’ll be back in San Francisco, and I’ll be fucking my fag friends’ bi-curious boyfriends, because nerdy gayboys are sexy and surprisingly good lays—and way less drama than Mission hipster dykes who drink too much. Never mind that in six months, Lola will be living in New Jersey, shacking up with a straight metal dude who dyes his hair platinum blonde and listens to Billy Idol and Black Sabbath nonironically Never mind that shit changes, that your fantasy is always perfect in your head, that you can come a thousand times over by touching yourself, but you usually have to show a lover how to do it the first time. Never mind that the first time you do something, even if it’s beautiful, even if it’s hot, it’s also awkward and nervous. Never mind that the nervousness, the awkwardness, is just what makes it so hot. Never mind that real, honest-to-god, genuine surprises are the sexiest thing imaginable.
Forget all that shit. Right now, not six months from now, not a year from now as I sit writing this at three in the morning in December, and it’s raining but still balmy outside like it gets here, and I’m feeling retroactively sad about how sad I was a year ago—that’s before all of this. Before I’m the San Francisco girl with the apartment and the housemate and the friends and the lovers and the job and the community. This is before I’m the girl who can love this city but has complaints about it—the small kinds of complaints that you would have about anyone you loved, but who sometimes still annoyed you.
Right now, there is no margin for San Franciscan error. Right now, this city is not where I live. I am in fucking Massachusetts, San Francisco is my escape, and like any good emo girl, I romanticize my escape to its fullest. San Francisco is the city that I fly to every time I whack off. I come hundreds of times in dreams that are always set in this city, my city, home. I dream of faraway lovers’ beds. I think about when Lee beat me til my ass turned purple, and made me suck her dick til I gagged so hard I cried, and fucked me slow and sweet in her soft big bed while the rain rocked the trees outside. They scratched at her windows, I swear, just like she’d scratched up my back. Her hands were so full of me. I couldn’t come, I was so nervous, so turned on, and then suddenly everything happened at once and I couldn’t stop coming. I almost cried, a second time in one day, because she was being so sweet. Kissing me, cooing, Just be a good girl and come for me, and I was expecting her to hurt me, but I wasn’t expecting tenderness, and that was the best surprise.
When we’re driving around the woods, caffeinated and horny, Lola always wants me to tell her Lee stories. How I entered a contest at a leather bar because some fag friends cajoled me into it, and because I smile easy and I’m good at selling raffle tickets. That’s what’s important if you’re a girl and you enter a contest at a divey fag bar. They don’t have gayboys in Western Mass like they do in San Francisco, and right now, I miss hanging out in fag bars almost as much as I miss marginally sane dykes over the age of eighteen. At the contest, I figured I could do fake dyke-fag flirting with the boys, charm them with my curly hair and cat’s-eye glasses and leopard-print skirt. At least a few of them would think it was adorable and fabulous that a femme dyke was there, and they’d buy tickets from me, and I’d have raised some money for the struggling AIDS organization, and I’d get to feel good about that.
And then I saw Lee. Lee and I were two dykes in a sea of fags, and she was butch and at least twenty years older, silver-haired and sweet-eyed. She wore a leather vest over her white T-shirt, there was a hunter green hanky in the left pocket of her jeans, and I thought to myself, Well, why not try? I smiled at her, shy, and I asked if she wanted to buy some raffle tickets before I saw that she had a whole roll of them hanging from her belt. “Oh, I guess you won’t be buying any, sorry. ...” I laughed, nervous, and she just stared at me. She held her breath for a split second, and then she said, “Well. . . wait.” She asked me, softly, if I did “that thing where you measure someone’s inseam with your raffle tickets.” I nodded, suddenly speechless, and an enormous grin crept across her face.
Lola loves this part, because she likes stories where women objectify me; I think it’s because she imagines herself in them. I can never quite tell if she’s thinking of herself as the one being objectified or the one doing the objectifying. For someone as femmey as she is, Lola has a dirty-old-man streak a mile wide. When she’s pissed at people, she refers to herself as “Daddy” or “Grampa,” in the third person, and tells me to go cut her a switch.
“Lee made me get down on my knees and measure tickets from her inseam to her boots,” I tell Lola. “She put my hand right up against her cock, and she held it there.” I never meet women like this in Massachusetts—the few older butches I encounter here are way too full of themselves to keep me interested in talking to them, let alone bottoming to them. But this woman, this woman I would bottom to for days. This woman got that my submission was a gift; I could tell that when she touched my hand to her dick. At first, I freaked myself out trying to hold her gaze, trying hard to look charming and cute instead of completely out-of-my-league and petrified. But her hand on mine, and the look in her eyes—suddenly, for that moment, she became my whole world. She told me I looked good on my knees, and that permission was all that I needed. I closed my eyes for a minute, feeling her hardness in my fingers, feeling the rough bar floor on my knees, and I sighed. She helped me up slowly, gave me a kiss on the cheek, and whispered into my ear, “Good girl.”
“I found out she was a judge in the contest after that,” I tell Lola, and Lola hoots and takes a swig of her Cherry Coke. Lee kept flirting with me from the little makeshift stage, and then she spanked me up against the bar—and she spanked all the contestants, but this was different—while a group of drunk shirtless fags cheered. “And while that was awesome,” I tell Lola, “that was not even the best part.” Afterward, after the pretense of the contest was long over with and we could flirt without being onstage, I sat on a barstool and Lee stood between my legs and held me. Things went from sweet to nasty so seamlessly with her. Her voice was low in my ear, she was telling me how good I was, What a sweet thing you are, and then she slid half her hand into my mouth and just fucked me like that. She sucked her breath in when she didn’t feel me gag, she sucked her breath in like I was sucking her cock, and for all intents and purposes, I was. Her other hand slid up my skirt, just grazing my thigh, but I was already soaking wet, I wanted to beg her to fuck me right there on the barstool, but I didn’t. “That was how we met. I guess that was our first date,” I tell Lola.
Lola likes my Lee stories because they remind her of her first butch ex-girlfriend, also a much older woman. “Shannon was taking my bra off, the last time we slept together ...” Lola says, her voice uncharacteristically wistful,"... and she looked at me .... Dude, she looked at me like God was in my bra.” I can see why—Lola’s fierce. I like her stories because they’re brave and just a little dangerous, full of this excellent fearlessness I wish I’d had when I was a teenager. Lola talks about sneaking around with Shannon when she was just barely legal, dragging her to her senior prom and getting drunk off liquor that Shannon bought for them, sneaking into the auditorium bathroom and fucking in one of the stalls while some football player and cheerleader were crowned prom king and queen.
Lola and I tell each other these things to keep us going in the now, because we have to keep thinking about some place, some time that is not this. We swap stories about women we’ve seduced, and we make jokes about people we hate, which gives Lola ample opportunity to use her favorite penis euphemisms, “wiener” and “wanger.” Lola also uses the word “gay” the same way that homophobic middle school boys do, but from her, it’s endearing. When I broke up with my last serious girlfriend, she took me out for Chinese food and said—the sincerest sympathy in her voice—"Baby, I’m sorry things are so gay right now.”
And right now, this now in Massachusetts, is precisely the problem. We are counting the days til graduation, the days til we can move back home. Never mind that Lola moves to San Francisco only to turn right around and move back to the East Coast with the unexpected hesher boyfriend. Never mind that I come back to San Francisco and start to fuck fags and femmes again, but that in a year I could be fucking butches and only butches, and that maybe someday I’ll turn into a top, and Lola’s boyfriend will be queer like us too.
Never mind that not knowing the outcome is always part of the turn-on. Right now, we blast Horses on Lola’s beat-up car stereo as we drive through the backwoods at 2:00 am. Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine. ... Oh, she looked so good, oh, she looked so fine. And I’ve got to tell the world that I’m gonna make her mine. . . . And we keep going, keep talking, keep driving, because it will get us out and move us on to the next thing we’d like to be sure about, but aren’t really. Right now, San Francisco is a future that we predict all the time. Right now, San Francisco is the land of milk and honey and silver-haired butch dykes with ten-inch cocks and freshly sharpened switchblades. Right now, San Francisco is where we will go to be femme chicken. Where we will work it, because we sure as hell cannot work it here.