“Tread delicately,” I said. “Where do you come off with this shit about me shocking you?”
“I didn’t even think of it. I mean, how are they even comparable? I mean what would…Wow! Is that what you thought?”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t know. So I asked.” We sat for a few seconds, rather glumly. Then I said: “Was he any good?”
She shrugged. “It’s five bucks.”
Then, because there was nothing else to do, I began to laugh. She did too. I put my arms around her and she sort of fell into them, still laughing.
“Hey!” Denny came up over the edge. “He was a real creep, huh? I’m sorry. Some guys you get, they aren’t so bad. Some are even pretty nice. I figured, you know, if I’m gonna get some john set up for your first time, you know, I should find somebody nice. I thought he was nice when I brought him back here but—what’s so funny?”
Which got us going all the harder.
Denny crawled behind us. “I wish you’d tell me what’s so funny about trickin’ with a creep like that.”
“While we’re skirting the subject,” I got myself together enough to ask, “have you balled any of the other guys in the nest?”
Lanya wriggled a little in my arms. “In the nest? Well, not here—”
“Where did you ball ’em?” Denny asked, rather sharply.
“Who,” I asked, “did you ball?” I guess I was surprised again.
“Revelation,” Lanya said.
I nodded.
“…and, well, Copperhead.”
“Jesus,” Denny said. “When?”
Lanya raised a forefinger to bite on the green polish. “You remember the night of Kid’s party, when he went off to Cumberland Park, during the fire, and found those kids, with George? You’d wandered off somewhere, Denny, and I was just sitting around here talking with everybody. Gladis and I were telling them about the House—that place where all the girls stay? They were very interested. So finally Gladis and I took Copperhead, Spitt, and Glass over—that’s where I pick up my birth-control stuff, anyway. The evening is a little hazy, but as I recall, Revelation wandered in just a little later—” She sat up, scowling at her lap. “Spitt retired early with a young lady he met right away—they just went upstairs. And Glass wasn’t feeling well so he left to come back here. But Copperhead and Revelation stayed around downstairs with the rest of us—Dragon Lady had come over, and everybody was yakking about old times—and got incredibly stoned. And—” She paused, her expression between consideration and confession—“eventually, I balled them. And—” she nodded at Denny—“your little girlfriend there balled them. And Gladis balled them. And Filament. And Dragon Lady. And, all in all, about—” she raised her fist and began opening it, finger at a time; raised her other fist—“nine other women balled them too. Not in that order: I was fifth or sixth.”
Denny said slowly and wondrously, “Wow…!”
“It was very funny.” Lanya dropped her shoulders. “I really thought the two of them had flipped out or something, at first. I was sort of scared for them. I don’t think they could have stood up and walked. It was almost like they were in some sort of half-trance. Revelation was lying on his back crying through most of it. That part didn’t turn me on too much. But it got some of the ladies off, and how! And he didn’t lose his hard-on.”
I was surprised and I was curious: “Did they come?”
“Maybe a couple of times at first. I think. But after that, they were just permanently up. Nobody gave ’em a chance to go down. You just did anything you wanted with them. And anyone who was interested did.”
In the middle of a corrective complaining about Risa’s/Angel’s joint cooking effort, Lanya turned to me as I came into the kitchen and said: “Kid, I had a thought, about your memory thing.”
“You all full of thoughts,” Angel said. “Whyn’t you shut up and let us cook?”
“She’s just helpin’,” Risa said.
“And she knows I’m just jokin’,” Angel said. “Don’t you?”
“I’ll shut up,” Lanya said.
I sat on a corner of the kitchen table. “What’s your idea?” A piece of silverware fell on the floor.
“Actually—” Lanya picked it up—” you have an amazing memory! I was snooping in your notebook again—forgive me, and I know you wilclass="underline" but your memory for conversation is practically photographic!”
“No it’s not,” I told her.
“I said ‘practically.’”
“No,” I said again. “About a third of any conversation I write down is just paraphrase.”
“Being able to remember two thirds of what people say, even a few minutes after they’ve said it, is very unusual. Even your account of the night in the park; and you told me you hardly remembered any of that.”
“I just wrote down what you said happened.”
“If you don’t have the lines right, you’ve certainly got the feeling! And with my hustling escapade, you’ve got all the lines. Those I remember.”
I said: “You read that too?”
“And also your accounts of some of the talks we’ve had together. I don’t know how they would stack up next to a transcript, but it’s still impressive.”
“So what’s your idea?”
“Just that, maybe, since you’ve got such memory for details, it has something to do with your losing track of whole periods of time or…well, you know.”
“That’s so interesting,” I said, “I think I’ll forget it right now.”
“She’s just tryin’ to help!” Risa said from the stove, clashing pot tops.
“And she too knows I am joking,” I said. “But even if you’re right, so what?”
Of course I didn’t forget it, witness this. Still, I suspect my highly creative renderings are more convincing than accurate, no matter what she says—I think (hope?).
“All girls?” Denny asked.
Lanya nodded.
“Shit.”
Lanya leaned against me. “I’ve never seen men in a state like that before. The whole thing was really very dyke-y.” She crossed her arms under her breasts. “I dug it. It was a little scary. But it was…an experience.”
“You’re just having experiences one after the other, aren’t you?” The first thing I thought of was what Risa had said to me that day out in the yard; what I found myself grinning at was that the possibility of a genital expedient for taking her suggestion left me just as dubious as an anal one about whether or not I wanted to go through something like that. Oh, well; maybe some people can’t have everything.
Lanya grinned up at me—“Um-hm”—and kissed my nose.
“What does your Madame Brown think about all this?” I asked.
“That I lead a wild and fascinating life.”
“Oh.” I nodded.
“She just wonders how I manage to get to school every day on time.”
“How do you manage to get to school every day on time?”
Lanya shrugged. “Just conscientious, I guess.”
“Jesus!” Denny sat back, his hands in his lap. “You gang-shagged Revelation and Copperhead! Hey—who was better, Pinky or the nigger?”
“Neither of them —” she leaned forward and kissed Denny’s nose—“was as sweet as you.”
“And by the way,” Denny said, “where’s my five bucks?”
I cuffed him. “Hey you want to hear what happened to me today?”
“It’s my five bucks, babes!” Lanya said.
Am writing this comment on what Lanya said about the girls shagging the two guys at the house right after finishing putting down my account of our chaos and confusion with the Emboriky (with Jack, wouldn’t you know, being that much help and making that much trouble!) because a lot of what happened there, what we said to them, what they said to us, pushed my mind back to it. I note that Copperhead and Revelation are pretty much exclusively-interested-in-girls guys; remember from last night (significant in terms of today?) Revelation politely trying to tell a pretty drunken Angeclass="underline" Really, it was nothing personal but, no, he didn’t want to fuck around with him, and no, he had never really tried it before, and no he didn’t want to, at least not now; and the two of them went on like this, quietly out on the service porch, for half an hour. The truth, of course, is that Revelation was vastly flattered by that much attention from someone that much quicker than he is and wanted to extend it as much as possible. (Did we think by paying them serious attention we were going to flatter them into getting their foot off our necks?) I think, sometimes, the difference is that they are sure that any social structures that arise grow out of patterns innate to The Sex Act—whatever that is; while we have seen, again and again, that the psychology, structures, and acoutrements that define any sex act are always internalized from social structures that already exist, that have been created, that can be changed. All right: Let me ask the terrible question: Could it be that all those perfectly straight, content-with-their-sexual-orientation-in-the-world, exclusive-heterosexuals really are (in some ill-defined, psychological way that will ultimately garner a better world) more healthy than (gulp…!) us? Let me answer: No way! The active ones (of whichever sex) are denser and crueler. The passive ones (of whichever sex) are lazier and more self-satisfied. In a society where they are on top, they cling like drowners to their active/passive, male/female, master/servant, self/other set-up not for pleasure, which would be reasonable, but because it allows them to commit or condone any lack of compassion among themselves, or with anyone else, and that (at least in this society, as they have set it up) is immoral, sick, and evil; any madness is preferable to that. And madness is not preferable!