cool and became chatty, explaining the mechanics of the house to me in all their gossipy glory. He laid out the tension between the more dedicated political anarchists and the anarchically libertine, told me the histories of recent residents and their replacements, detailed whose yearnings for whom had been kindled, returned, rebuffed in storylines involving twists of sexual orientation and both principled and not-quite-so non-monogamy. I raked it all in as if I were studying for a high-stakes final while I gulped my beer and batted my eyes at him.
“Are you an anarchist?” he asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said. Anarchism wasn’t en vogue at Oberlin. I could tell that the house members who were part of Wooden Shoe bookstore collective didn’t have too much to do with the circled A of the Sex Pistols, but that was about it. “Are you?”
He paused thoughtfully. “I’m a Situationist.”
“What’s that?”
“You never read Guy Debord at that fancy college?” We’d already established that he knew about Oberlin. A woman on the scene, an elegant junkie from money who’d never stopped slumming, had gone there, too, for a while.
“No.”
“I’ll loan it to you. After you read it, then we’ll talk. Are you a feminist?”
“Yes.”
He gave a rueful grin. I congratulated myself on the right answer, true and sexy.
IT’S AMAZING HOW FAST identities shift and gel at that tender age. Six months earlier, Reba had been renting a room from a yuppie graphic designer in Center City. I had come to visit over winter term to intern at the feminist paper, and we’d tiptoed around the city she was still finding her way in, trying to slip into cool clubs or bars, then standing at the edges of them. It’d only been a year since I’d simultaneously discovered vibrators and Kathy Acker, two things that seemed absolutely essential to my notion of myself as I sat twisting next to Carl on the barstool that day.
Reba had sent the vibrator to me in New Mexico, where I was spending the summer. It was a huge, Caucasian penis model powered by D batteries that she’d picked up at a corner porno store. Acker’s novel Don Quixote I had special ordered at a Santa Fe bookshop, a waitressing job finally providing me with the money to pay for it after I’d been carrying around a review of it for months. I expected the book to be a revelation, and it was. Reading it, I felt discovery and recognition even when I couldn’t understand what Acker was saying. Unfamiliar with the original Don Quixote, I couldn’t use it as a template, but Acker’s protagonist was made a knight by receiving an abortion, I understood that much. I sensed some truth about armor and pure resolve arising from violence and shame, and the way this inevitably led to sexing with multitudes, with people of every age and gender variation and also dogs. YES! I wrote in the margin. The book’s exuberance and lack of plot stimulated and exhausted me and often sent me back to bed, where I’d probably just come from anyway, since I spent a lot of time there with the vibrator. Sometimes I combined activities, and used the vibrator while reading. Each orgasm grew up from my toes.
I TROTTED OUT Acker’s name now, the coolest one I knew. Carl hadn’t read her, but he knew of her, he approved. He’d heard she was a Burroughs disciple.
“No she wasn’t! That’s not true!” I cried out. I had no idea, really, but I couldn’t allow the fierce knight Kathy Acker to be slotted as the little sister of the guy who’d shot his wife in the head. Burroughs’s punk godfather status and his renowned act of misogyny created the kind of uncomfortable dissonance in my head that make me argue with any boy listening. But at that point in the day, in the drinking, in the opening bars of our relationship, my stridency floated right past Carl.
“Have you ever been in love, Zoe?” His chin was on his fist, his eyelids at half-mast, his eyes on mine but slightly unfocused.
“Yes,” I said, relieved that my sword wasn’t needed to defend Kathy Acker’s honor and that I could slip back into being a courted girl who prided herself on using honesty as a method of flirtation. “I have.” I gave a heavy sigh as if love’s ravages wearied me, and then I looked up from my beer with a knowing smirk.
I’d met my guitar-playing boyfriend my freshmen year, and he’d been my first real lover, the first person with whom I both figuratively and literally slept on any kind of regular basis. It wasn’t long before we were practically symbiotic, informing each other’s speech patterns and thesis sentences and food choices, growing what appears now in the few photos that exist to be a single mop of unruly hair and engaging in passionate deconstruction of our every utterance, especially on the subjects of power, gender, genius, sex. Although we’d had a rocky road the last couple months of school, under the pressure of his graduating and the future’s uncertainty, he was coming to Philadelphia in a couple weeks to live for the summer because I was there, a fact that was dissolving in my mind like a sugar cube dropped into beer. I let my answer stand unelaborated upon, an implied past tense. Walking back to West Philly in a haze of Colt 45 and chemistry, I was already gone. I had gnawed off that important relationship and left it behind in the bar as if it were a limb in the maws of a trap.
CARL AND I didn’t sleep together that night or the next night. I don’t remember how many days later it was that I made my way to his room. I don’t remember his invitation, or how I got there, or if I had officially broken up with my boyfriend yet or not. But I can almost smell the chemical firing from my brain being blown. He lived on the third floor in what had once been a kitchen. Against one wall remained a sink and some cheap cabinets, and against another a few plastic milk crates held albums. A mannequin wearing a gas mask stood guard in one corner. There was no other furniture. We sat on opposite sides of the mattress on the floor for a brief, loaded exchange of sentences, and then he crawled toward me slowly, his large face coming first, pointy-chinned like a cat, thick lips protruding. It was the last moment of calm.
He was less like Marlon Brando in bed and more like the Transexual Transvestite from Transylvania. He was hypermasculine and campily feminine. He was huge and graceful and sure and louche. He had swiveling hips and a massive finger span and no shame. He was not afraid of any part of me and not afraid of hurting me or displeasing me. He was greedy, but also baldly fascinated by my avidity and receptivity. The strokes of his dick unloosed in me every pornographic cliché I’d imbibed in my near decade-long exploration of smut prose: I’m impaled, I thought ecstatically. He’s in me up to my throat! As each worn phrase exploded through my consciousness I felt like I was meeting truth, being made real. When he came I clutched at what I thought was the end before discovering his first orgasm was like my own, less a satisfaction than an antagonism, just a vista on the way to the top of the mountain—grandeur, yes, ahhhh, have a drink—but then back to got-to-get-there, got-to-get there, higher, more. It was a sweltering night and the sheet soon pulled off and the texture of the worn mattress was pilly and disgusting. Our fingernails filled with the black of each other’s dead skin. Sweat slicked our bodies. Even hours into it, his penis thwacked back toward his stomach when I let it go. His moves had been impressive, but then we went to a place beyond moves. We were not so much communing as erupting.
At one point, we lay apart, backs propped against the wall, legs splayed, touching just at our hooked ankles, both twitching, in a fevered trance. I was brought back to myself by the arrhythmic shaking of the mattress; I saw he was jerking himself off, the streetlight coming in and laying blue on our bodies. I watched him. So this is what we were going to do now, I thought. I touched myself too, but my fingers didn’t feel good in the raw folds, and he was oblivious to me. Without his interest I became confused. I took a breath and rolled toward him, straddled high on his thigh and moved my mouth towards his head.
“I don’t know what you want me to do,” I whispered. Our skin
