We drank coffee in silence.
The coffee cups drained, sat side by side on the kitchen table. I picked them up, added more hot water and watched the cups sink beneath a blanket of soap suds and scattered sodden cornflakes.
Yellow gloved I slid my hands beneath the water.
The Woman slid her hand along my arm.
The water through the glove is warm. Its pressure holds the glove against my hand.
The Woman’s hand is warm. The pressure of her lips on my neck holds my breath inside my lungs.
The Woman is warm outside. I am warm inside.
But my skin shivered in expectation and surprise and unsurprise, in awareness and willing ignorance.
The cups sit side by side on the draining board.
A fingernail-full of soap bubbles slides down the side of the cup.
The Woman slides down the side of me.
My leg is smooth. So is the Woman’s touch.
So is her mouth.
I fumbled with my gloved hands, stripped myself of kitchen yellow.
Ungloved, my hands were naked.
I will be soon.
One glove falls, thumb filling with water.
Turns. Sinks.
As does She.
As do I.
And now hands which have been soft become sharp and lithe and everywhere, all over me, strong hands writhing and seething, and pulling at my hair, pinching my nipples, in my eyes, my ears, mouth, cunt, deep for me. Softest-in-the-world lips to breasts, mean teeth clawing their way through my thin skin. I am hip bone impaled. Ten long fingers everyplace at once, entangling my hair, toes clawing, not caressing but harassing hard and sharp and constant and overwhelming and she is touching me she is making me and she is wanting me and I am wanting too until wanting becomes hard and solid, wanting is made woman, is made flesh in our joining and into the exquisite agony of persistent touch I am teased taunted bullied goaded, into orgasm, into bloody bitter piercing coming and I cry out and I arch and I am the same shudder and am those long hands on which my body centres itself pivoting and am those dark eyes and am and am no more and I am.
In bed, I studied the Woman. Long and wide and full. Colour glancing off her body like shaded sunlight. Heavy as warm oil. The Woman had brought food – avocados from the Philippines and melon from Fiji, strawberries and fat grapes. Summer fruits and autumn night closing outside.
Sated, we turned to the window as the first sky rocket touched its zenith.
Someone else was putting on a firework show, unwittingly and intentionally for the sole pleasure of the Woman and me. A single silver light climbed, disappeared for a second and became seven white stars. Points of green exploded into solid, starred orbs. It went on.
It goes on. She and I sit spellbound. There is no “as if”. The display is for us. The last rocket falls.
The Woman falls to me. Falls in my lap. Lapping. Lapped. I stretch my hand through the Woman’s hair and find they are not tresses or curls, but locks. I am locked in. Single strands of long black hair twist and bind me to the Woman. Lock me to the Woman.
I don’t want to look for the key.
The room is bigger and the bed softer than it was before.
Before the Woman.
I lie in the Woman’s arms.
The Woman lies in my arms.
But this is the Truth.
We sleep with the Southern Cross carved into our eyelids and in the morning are rainlight wakened.
And he never came back.
And they never came back.
And the Woman stayed forever.
And it was real.
It is real.
Because I say it is.
She and I are the word made flesh. Make the word flesh.
Because I say so.
MOBIUS STRIPPER by Bana Witt
1 Hot Nazis
I was riding on the 7 Haight bus to my massage job downtown when I sat down next to a thin friendly blonde girl. She was on her way to the clap clinic. She said she had clap of the throat. She might have gotten it from a girl she had worked with on a porno film. I had never met anyone who’d done porn before, or even seen any for that matter. She said she was working for these really nice guys called the Mitchell Brothers and told me just to call their theater if I wanted to work.
I was very excited by the idea. I had just started to get into S amp;M: having boyfriends who liked to tie me up or spank me, biting hard, doing things that left marks and looking at my own marks after a long night. I thought I was about as kinky and decadent as anyone. I called after thinking about it for a few days. I went to an interview at the O’Farrell Theater and was confused by the incredible similarity between the two brothers. They were fine-boned, relatively small men, with a way of making the bizarre seem totally routine. The older brother was Jim, the younger, Artie. They asked me if I’d ever done this sort of work before and I said no, but that I was a masochist and loved to be beaten and they could really do it if they wanted. There was a list of other things they asked if I would do. I said yes to them all. They told me they were going to do a series of short, very hardcore films called Ultra Core.
A few days later I went to a large brick building in the Tenderloin. It’s across from Hyde Street Studios now. I was overweight and not nearly as flashy as the other women, but much more enthusiastic. They had this outrageously beautiful makeup woman who was also from Fresno. Years later she would fall in love with my friend Patty at my wedding.
The title of the film was Hot Nazis and I was to play a lesbian Jew. I was very impressed when I heard Michael Bloomfield was writing the music. There were no scripts.
One room was a reproduction of a bleak concrete bunker. At one end was a large radio. On the wall to the left was a barbed wire cage filled with straw and bones, fresh bones from cattle legs. There was a large wiry German shepherd gnawing on one of the bones. Myself and a girl named Virginia were to be in the cage. I took her aside to find out if she really liked women. She did. She had done a lot of this work before. We were given torn thermal underwear to wear and smudged up a little. The first scene to be shot was of us getting it on in the straw. I had no idea having an audience would get me off so much. Virgina knew the ropes and nothing was faked. I was pretty submissive. She gave ferocious head and finger fucked me until I screamed.
The crew applauded our first scene. Then Artie (in retrospect I know it was Artie) asked me if I would fuck the dog. It boggled my mind. I wanted to be a trooper, but the dog! I declined and Virgina attempted to get the dog aroused. The dog growled. They left him alone.
The rest of the action focused around a tall gaunt man named Vernon, who played head Nazi and his girlfriend Enjil, a beautiful Nordic woman. There were several men playing Gestapo guards and a woman with dark hair named Monique. They did some scenes of the guards fucking one another and the girls, and then it was my turn again. I was to be held down on a table and screwed by Vernon. Everyone was doing hits off a full bottle of liquid amyl nitrate. I was lying on my back and he started out by running a riding crop across my body. Slowly he began tapping it on the insides of my thighs. He hit harder and harder, at which point my girlfriend was supposed to pull him off and he was to continue by screwing me. Only he wouldn’t stop whipping me. Every time he lifted the crop there would be a bright new red stripe on my body. She tried to pull him off and he pushed her into the barbed wire that was wrapped around the cage. He returned to continue beating me now for real. He was laying the whip into my very white skin as hard as he could. Finally Virginia yelled “CUT!” to the cameramen. They realized we weren’t just acting and subdued Vernon. In the film the welts were unbelievable. Virginia’s leg bled real blood from the barbed wire.
They wanted just one final insertion shot on the table. I lay down, face up. I asked Monique for a hit of the amyl nitrate. She tilted the bottle and poured the whole thing up my nose and into my eyes. The burning was unbelievable. I jumped up screaming, and then I started rushing. It was like I’d shot speed and jumped off a cliff at the same time. Everything was buzzing and my ears were ringing and I couldn’t get my breath. Jim had gotten water and was flushing my face with it. I knew I was going to have a seizure. I knew I was going to be blind. I knew I should go to the hospital. It was the most total, complete panic I’ve ever had.