C h a p t e r

S e v e n

IT WAS HALLOWEEN NIGHT AND THE STREET SOUNDED OF FIREcrackers and shouting. I lay languid in the tub, watching vapor rise off the hot water around me. Steam swirled up through the candlelight. I bought the candles at a store across the street that always smelled of sandalwood and musk. They sold bone crucifixes, colored saint beads and little statues of St. Francis. The Mexican lady had scented oils for love or winning money, one called Fiery Wall of Protection and a smaller bottle of pink liquid called Guardian, which she said attracted angels to watch over babies. When I was sick last year Bell had bought a special remedy, a mason jar of green liquid. He'd opened the bottle, dipped his fingers and run them lightly over my feverish skin. There was a sudden smell of mint. The elixir was first cool, then warm, like a winter kiss.

I soaped a washcloth, slid it into the ridge of my rear, pressing it just inside my anus, then rung it out and ran the bar of soap over it again until the material was thick with lather. Sliding the cloth into the folds of my pussy, soaping up the hair, I thought about douches and feminine sprays and the jokes high school boys used to make about women smelling like fish. What was it that made everyone so uncomfortable? Women worry that the scent reveals their sexuality and makes them vulnerable as dogs in heat. To men, the smell evoked the mysteries of the female body, which were cosmic but also threatening.

The cheap candles smelled of animal fat, dripping wax dark as ink on the porcelain tub. I let my hands, palms up, float to the top, the wrinkled tips breaking the surface. My hand had seemed separate when I jerked off the man from the gay bar last night. Each finger had a mind of its own and an eye in its tip. I watched the hand work on his cock, make an orifice out of fingers, squeeze down until he closed his eyes, imagining an ass as huge as the universe. Now the skin of my fingers was loose and gray as a cadaver. What could they be plotting? I wondered if the function of my body might be different from the function of my mind. I sensed the peace one found if they subverted either mind over body like a monk, or body over mind like a whore. You could hold both only if they were separated and severely so, like the right and left brain when the fissure is broken in surgery. I was trying by trusting my animal instincts over my intellectual ones.

Outside a man screamed something in Spanish. All good things are coming to an end, I thought, and though I knew it was true, I wasn't sure if I meant for me or for everyone. Divorce had given me the horrific sensation that the two sides of myself were at odds. I am the worst kind of person, attractive, overeducated, raised with middle-class delusions of grandeur. But it's not just me; family life in America sucks, because if you're even a bit smart, the pressure from your family to jump classes is excruciating. There's this insane idea that materialism creates status. Even if you make some headway, it's an internal jump. You're always middle-class, talking on your cellular phone with your color TV muted. We should never have cast ourselves like gods, on TV or in movies—it ruined our memories, made us long and lust, in love now only with the image of ourselves. And perfected others: the nicest guys I see are characters on TV.

I've mesmerized myself watching the water droplets loosen from the faucet. They catch light before joining their multiple selves. There is a bit of motion at the edge of my vision, it's the snake. I've seen it moving in the drapes, shifting in the blankets.

THE RAIN STOPPED AND WARM MEXICAN AIR BLEW INTO THE streets. A little girl passed painted up like a whore, but it was too late for little girls. Ahead, on the other side of the street, a group of skinheads came toward me, angry about something. Hands deep in their pockets, they jumped on one another like monkeys trying to copulate. Some wore hooded sweatshirts and hockey masks over their shaved heads. A few carried baseball bats or cartons of eggs. I saw the swastikas on their jackets and the familiar White Brotherhood logo. I was wearing an outfit of Madison's: red velvet bell-bottoms and a rhinestone-studded shirt and was worried they'd bother me. The tallest one, in a hockey mask, banged his bat against the brick wall. I turned, started to walk back the way I came when there was a sudden thud, then a burst like heavy rain. He'd shattered the window of the transvestite lingerie store. Tranced by the foam-filled bras and high heels as big as a strong man's work boot he reached in and took a garter studded with rhinestones. He looked like a monster holding a kitten. The skinheads were startled by the objects in the window which could so easily change them. A man came out from the next building in a ratty bathrobe, his eyes smeared with make-up.

“FAGGOT!” one screamed and they were suddenly on him. “Queer, butt blaster, fudge pirate!” They bashed his head against the hood of a parked car. The steely echo of the hood, absorbing the force of their fists on his body, made me shiver with nausea. It would have gone on forever but the police pulled up, lights flashing. One skinhead ran, then they all did.

“God damn,” the man said, reeling. He touched his head where blood was matting in his hair. Another man came out from the apartment building in stretch pants and high heels. He helped the man to the doorway of the shop and held him while he sobbed.

San Francisco confounded me. First it seemed utopian, with the blue skies, pervasive Mediterranean light, palm trees, organic vegetable stores that sold strawberry juice, the children in funky handmade sweaters. But all that was an overlay—misleading and cosmetic. Underneath was a history of decadence: the opium dens in Chinatown, the thousand whores who worked the gold rush, the voodoo and witchcraft shops. Even the fast-moving fog was nightmarish. There were leather monsters fucking dogs and each other in the alleyways of SoMa and the living dead haunting the Castro cafés. Sure, there were hippies gentle and peace-loving, but there was also the Manson family, the SLA and the Jim Jones Kool-Aid test. And California is the outpost of rigid conservatism . . . the home of Nixon and Reagan. Satanists are in the hills, chanting Latin, drinking urine, forcing candles into the tops of rotten deer heads. And, of course, there was Hollywood, the mimetic desire capital of the world.

From way up the block Carmen's was explosive. Each time the door opened, music hammered out and the crowd spilled outside. Curtained windows upstairs had continuous plays of light and shadow, which meant the rooms were occupied. On the front door was a newsprint picture of a plane crash and over it Madison had drawn the devil's eyes and a round howling mouth. I paused for a moment with my fingers on the handle listening to the pulse of music, knowing Madison was teasing the audience with her pelvis.

Inside I let my eyes adjust to the black light. There was a sudden jerk to my right. In the dark spot reached only by nipples of electronic light, a lap dancer, a new girl, was straddling a man who smiled leeringly at her, his white teeth glowing. She needed extra money and would let the men put their cocks inside of her. With his hands on her hips the man manipulated her body, up and down. She swayed back from him, as if he'd just said something rude.

Drag queens danced on the bar in miniskirts and floppy hats. Madison was dancing topless, wearing denim short-shorts. She had greased her body so it gleamed under the bluish light. The lap dancers wore garters and push-up bras, the men in rumpled business suits, some in cotton sweaters and polyester pants hiked over their bellies. There was a man in a devil mask with a bow tie that squirted water. A woman passed me with a huge extension wig and another in diamond-studded glasses. Lita, the early evening bartender, was grumpy, hated the jumpsuit Madison forced her to wear. She said a drunk man had pinched her tit and whenever she reached into the cooler for a frosted glass, it hurt.

I started washing the backed-up glasses, helped Lita pour beers, all the time watching Madison pulse her hips toward the ceiling. I was busy cracking beers, taking money. When I looked up again she was gone and I imagined her on the back stairs, getting a drink of water, putting on her white robe.

But then she was near me, leaning out of the stairwell shouting that she wanted to talk in the bathroom. I followed her. Everyone was drunker than usual and it was a relief to step out of the noise and laughter into the quiet. She locked the door, put down the toilet seat and sat. I hadn't noticed how red the walls were and how people had scratched things into the paint—the letters reminded me of little bones . . . NIGGERS ARE BETTER LOVERS, PUSSY IS GOD. Someone knocked on the door, Madison ignored it. I noticed through her damp make-up that she looked tired. Pubic hair had gathered on the damp porcelain and someone had left her black bikini underwear rolled up in the corner.

She rubbed the track marks on her arms and tipped her head back, as if wanting the play of colored lights on the underside of her eyelids. I was amazed how she could go for days without sleep. How when she was hurt you could tell only by the movement of her hands. She had no one, so no restrictions either. She couldn't understand worrying about not having a boyfriend or a husband or a baby. Where was her weak spot? Did Pig teach her one person could love another blindly? Or had Pig disappointed her, shown how everyone who loves you needs to control you. Madison thinks that to devastate yourself is somehow life-affirming. I was reminded of a tar-covered cat, a pretty lizard that can shed multiple skins. She looked at me then.

“Susan's not here. Want to make some real money?”

I nodded. Madison stood, opened the door. We entered the noisy bar full of men's faces, numerous and similar as kidney beans. “It will be a relief,” she said. “Kneel down to it.”

FROM INSIDE SUSAN'S ROOM I COULD HEAR THE FISH TANKS bubbling and men's footfalls in the hall. The room had the glowing muted tones of a baroque painting, with its gold glass lamps and orange satin spread. The black garter belt and stockings were in the closet as Madison had said. I secured the garter over my hips and affixed each strap to the top of the stocking. I cracked the seal on the Wild Turkey and swigged directly from its lip, convincing myself I was waiting for my husband, who was coming up the stairs in his black banker shoes, locking up our house. His footsteps creaked on our wood floors, then padded on the carpeted stairs. He would talk to me while he undressed, say, “I think we should get some tulip bulbs for the garden.” I'd hear his hangers cling in the closet as he hung up his pants, then the rich smell of his body coming toward me.

There was a tentative knock, the kind a doctor makes to see if you've used the paper gown to cover up. I said, “Come in.” He was as old as my father, hair combed over his bald spot like a gym teacher, his features ragged and pointed like an eagle's. I started to pull off my clothes and he came over, sat on the other side of the bed and undressed. When I asked him what he wanted he said tersely, “To have sex.”

I heard him rip the condom package and that sticky elastic sound as he rolled it down. He turned toward me quickly and threw one leg over, burying his face in my neck. He forced his cock in and began a series of anxious little thrusts. There was a print of a princess with a pale pinched face above the bed. I noticed how his underarms stank and the ridiculous way he held his mouth pinched up like a rectum. Both his stench and his expression reminded me of the professor I had slept with in college.

The long hairs flapped from his bald head, swayed over my face. He warned me he was going to come and when he did his back arched and he moaned. Relaxing his body weight on top of me, he sucked air for a while, then rolled away, pulled his condom off and lobbed it into the trash can. While he was dressing he watched me with an expression of hate and lust. I leaned back against the headboard, watched him leave, felt the skin of my vagina tingle. I stared at the bulbous lamp on the nightstand, something seemed to be inside of the gold brass waiting to get out. It was an ugly lamp with a faux-suede shade. I thought of how the Nazis had made lamp shades out of people's skin.

The door opened again, slowly, as if the next man hoped to catch me fucking the first. This one was chubby with a little black beard.

“Put your butt up high,” he said, closing the door behind him. I got on all fours, cradled my head in my arms, and raised my ass. He unlatched his belt, then his fly, his pants rustled to the floor. Kneeling on the bed in back of me, “Up higher,” he said and pressed his cock in, dug his fingernails into my ass. After several long breathy strokes he said, “My brother is going to come in here and put his dick in your mouth, he'll pull your hair until his cock is in to the hilt and you'll moan.

“Moan,” he said, and I did. “We'll fuck you every day because you have a nice tight pussy and you liked to be fucked in the ass.” He pulled hard and told me he could kill me if he wanted, that nobody would care. I felt his loose tummy resting on my lower back like a rat. His pace accelerated and he made a sound like clearing his throat as he came. He tried to lean over me, to grab my tits, but I jumped away and went into the bathroom, wet a washcloth and wiped my pussy. I looked at the bright sink, the water gurgling in the toilet, the fringe of a towel hanging on a rack by the door. With my hands I pulled my hair straight back and looked into my eyes. I am still myself. I remembered after the abortion in college going to a blind shrink, how he held my hand, put his fingers around my wrist. “You're thin,” he said. “Is that a problem?” I liked how his one eye was yellowish and glowed like a moon. “You are a girl who has been lonely,” he said. “Why do you choose that dark path?”

Madison came in, went over to the bed and poured bourbon into a glass. I put my bell-bottoms on, buttoned my studded shirt. “So was it horrible?” she asked. It was a question similar to the kind my father used to ask when he first left my mother. “Are you O.K.?” he would ask and the only answer would be yes. “It's hard the first few times,” she said handing the glass to me. “They haunt you like one-night stands, but if you just relax, it happens. It gets to be like passing people on the street.”

“It wasn't really that bad,” I said. And it seemed true. Watching the skinhead beating was more riveting and I cried the time my mother called me a bitch. This feeling was so familiar, what happened to me was never real. Emotional experiences happened to others. I got the picture in my head of my mother, brooding, dangerous. And me leaning toward her, caught up in the aura of her pain.

“So now you know what it's like to do the thing most repulsive to women.” She took two hundred dollars from her pocket and passed it to me. I started to talk . . . how good it would be to make a lot of money. How I would get my own apartment and a car so we could drive down Highway 1 to L.A.

Madison's cheeks flushed, she looked into her glass. “It's not about money, it's about death.”

“Of course it is,” I said. “I know that.” I was quiet, thinking it over. The glitter in her hair caught light and for a moment there in the half light she looked demonic.

She asked if I'd seen Pig.

“Not since I started,” I told her.

Madison wound the top of the bottle down. “I met Pig at a titty bar south of Market. If I let her touch my tits she would give me twenty dollars. Eventually she offered to pay me to come over and walk up and down her spine.”

“Then you lived with her?”

“Only after she begged me. I was a lap dancer and lived with a guy who sculpted naked ladies. He got hooked on heroin and started stealing from me. I holed up at Pig's. It wasn't so bad until she started to get that look whenever I went near her. One night she was looking at me.” Madison burlesqued Pig's dreamy eyes. “And I realized if I slept with her, she would think of it forever. So I did her and it was O.K., till she started moaning.”

Madison laughed. I knew I should too, but her attitude toward Pig was cruel and adolescent. It was one thing to say Pig had taken advantage of her, another to make fun of her sexuality. She doubled over laughing. I felt uncomfortable and watched the street light move on the curtains. Madison was acting crazy, but I didn't trust my observations because the chair ribs hurt my back and the rug was rough on my bare feet. My bourbon looked like a flame—I have done the thing I was most afraid of . . . what will happen now?

AFTERWORK MADISON TOOK ME TO A PLACE IN CHINATOWN JUST off Grant Street called the Buddah Bar. High black-vinyl stools and a sagging string of blinking paper lanterns lined the bar. When the bartender saw Madison he nodded hello and hit a little brass bell attached to the cash register. A slim woman appeared in an electrician's jumpsuit wearing round wire frames with rose-colored glass. She led us silently down the back stairs and along a narrow hallway to a metal door fortified by several dead-bolt locks. I swayed woozily . . . time no longer held me. I felt lucky, freed, as I had been, by a fifth of bourbon. I watched a vein in Madison's temple pulse, stepped back so I could mouth, without her seeing me, “She is wild . . . she is dangerous.” Madison pounded the door with the side of her fist.

“Open up,” she said. “It's me.” The eyehole darkened and then a melodious voice, I thought at first it came from inside my drunken head, said . . . “Madison dear, hold on.” The tone was deep, but slightly tilted like a woman's. Keys jangled and the first of many locks clicked back.

“Habee is a hermaphrodite,” Madison whispered. “If you're nice to him he may show you.” She licked her fingers and smoothed her eyebrows. The door opened and there was Habee, a Lebanese man in coffee-colored silk pajamas, his long hair held in a braid down his back. He had small breasts like a teenager and was deeply tan like people who live out-of-doors.

“Delighted,” Habee said, swinging his hands open and kissing Madison. “If Madison hasn't told you,” he said, turning to me, “this is where it all leaves off.”

“This is a friend of mine,” she said as we stepped inside. “Isn't she lovely?”

Habee held my chin between his thumb and forefinger, forced my head to the left for a profile. Then took my hands, turned them over and back. He shook his head.

“I haven't seen anything like her since I was in Amsterdam.” He led us to one of the low tables in the middle of the room. Sweet smoke hung near the ceiling, the walls were tiled in mosque patterns of blues and greens, and maroon Orientals covered the floors. Four high standing candelabras gave the place plenty of light. No hard furniture to sit on, just pillows and several short wooden tables for hookah pipes. There were shadows behind the drapes dividing the room into private compartments and a soft smell of sweat. A man in a tuxedo was lying down with his hand propping up his head. His hair was slick and black and when he sat up to greet me, he kissed my hand.

“Better to search for heaven than not,” he said.

“Oh loosen up,” Habee said. “You're behaving all wrong.” The man got up, bowed, put one arm over his head and the other elegantly out to the side and tiny-stepped on his tiptoes away from us toward another group of people talking near the gold tile fireplace on the far side of the room.

“What'sa matter with Georgie?” Madison said.

“Oh, you know, he doesn't really like girls.”

“I do,” she said, pressing her shoulder against mine. I could tell she was glad I was here. She'd matched me shot for shot at Carmen's, but had gotten only more dignified . . . more prophetic. She'd told me I'd eventually regret every night of my life except for this one. And with the bourbon surrounding everything with a lovely halo of melancholy, I thought, She is so right.

Habee lit the opium in the glass bottom of the hookah pipe and the perfumed smoke wafted toward me.

“I must tell you both,” Habee said, taking short puffs to keep the smoke coming, “about a trip I just took to Mexico. I went to see an old friend of mine. I had no idea it would be so fantastic. He and about twenty others stay in caves by the water. All day they swim and fuck. A woman brings their food. They just stretch out in the sun like otters, it was the most remarkable thing.”

“Sounds like you found your calling,” Madison said, accepting the pipe, adjusting the hose so the smoke could move easily into her mouth.

“No, my best times were in the circus. I had a lovely gown . . . silk with blue roses. And there was a boy who gave me flowers. Really, he got quite obsessed with me and would wait until late to walk me to my trailer.” Habee took the pipe himself, puffed a thoughtful pigeon of smoke. “Anyway, it had to do with a rainy day and a back rub.”

“Sounds lurid,” I said, taking the mouthpiece and putting it to my lips. The smoke was smooth as milk.

“Yes?” Habee said, opening his eyes wide and waiting.

“Well.” I exhaled. “Did you hurt him?”

Habee smiled and took the pipe. “I assure you I did not. But that reminds me of a theory I'm developing. I think if men still hunted for deer or bear, more of them would be happy with their wives. Because now, you see, all men can hunt is women. It's terrible for them, their last connection to that savage wild man. They hunt. They kill.”

“Kill?” Madison said.

“You know, the moment a man comes, he's taken what he needs to feed himself.”

I felt queasy about his theory and about the little boy. I felt confused. I knew adultery was O.K., as was homosexuality and prostitution, but what about incest and older people taking advantage of younger ones? What about murder and cannibalism? It all made me uneasy because I could foresee being able to understand almost anything. I knew extreme behavior-hate, lust, domination—could be, as in Madison's case, just an extreme type of self-preservation. And I knew too that Habee would agree with Madison, that it was a weak and herdish thing to be “good.” Being nice was just a cover for weakness. I knew too that I was capable of knowing what was good for me, but doing the opposite. Once while I was home on Christmas break from school I slept with an old lover in some strange house he had the keys to. The sheets smelled like other people's bodies. My lover was melancholy, drank beers, brooded. It made me feel uneasy, even now, because I'd known it wasn't right to go there every evening to fuck and smoke cigarettes in a stranger's bed, but I did it anyway.

Everything around me seemed suddenly lushly alive. The ceramic patterns on the walls looked like DNA chains. Madison was talking about a john who had only wanted to kiss. “And he kissed so fake,” she said, “like he thought he was a movie star.”

She turned to me and put her lips on mine, opened her mouth and let her tongue wiggle around. Her mouth tasted of melon and I felt as if I were swimming in very warm water.

“The two of you are wonderful to behold,” Habee said, patting his heart.

Madison laughed and started to tell about a time when she was little. She'd forced all the kids in her neighborhood to take communion: wine made from poison sumac berries.

Had she really wanted to kiss me or was she showing off for Habee? Even her most intimate gestures were ambiguous. She was listening to him talk now about his mother, how she never woke, sleeping with her hands palsied up and the pee trickling into the clear plastic bag beside her. “It is a shame,” he said, “that such a precious spirit has taken flight.” Then Madison told about her mother, how she'd been raped and murdered in a lot behind the local grocery store, how the guy poured lighter fluid over her and set the whole field on fire.

“Jesus,” I said. “You don't just tell a story like that.”

They both looked at me, surprised the story startled me. Habee patted me coldly, turned to Madison, who told how the police had searched for the man though he was never found. Watching Madison talk I realized her coldness and cruelty were ways, known only to herself, of feeling more strongly than others.

Shadows shifted again behind the silk divider near us. A man breathed rhythmically and I could see a pelvis swaying against the rear and back of a bent figure. The sound of skin slapping skin reminded me of the skinheads. Madison touched my arm and said, “He's agreed to show you.” Habee was waiting, with his fingers splitting his pajamas, showing me his cunt, which was wide and lovely with folds and folds of pink skin. From inside came the limp cock, tiny balls too. I thought strangely of my mother, how she walked around the house in a half-slip, how she showed me rashes on her thighs, a pimple on her breast, how there seemed no delineation between her pain and mine. I asked, “Does any of it work?” He leaned toward me, his strong smell of cinnamon and the sweet smoke of opium swirled and he said, “It all depends on what you mean.”