Dykes

If you read a good biologist like physiologist Jared Diamond you will see that male and female have related but not identical sexual agendas. Some, only some part, of common sense is congruent with the informed, inspired thinking of geniuses. I summarize that common sense is right in that the female typically responds to what she sees as "mate quality" before accepting a sex partner. But the female has her own agenda for adultery as well as her own capacity for simple experiment. Looking back on my life I believe I've responded more to adventure and experiment than to mate quality. Even in my mate I was attracted to what I recognized as neurosis. I like them a little crazy.

The story that brings me back to this folder today concerns something more than a little crazy and not at all mate quality. It relates to the bulk of the foregoing stories not only in being about things male and female but in being about nothing happening. I always best remember the girls I didn't fuck.

1958 we're having dinner in our usual restaurant: a block and a half north of the Tom's made so visible on Seinfeld. The door opens. My jaw drops. A Bohemian elf entered, went up to the owner, whispered something, and slipped back out. She was petite. She wore a cape. Little Black Ridinghood. She was pale as pale. Her lips were bare. Her eyes were darkened. An American Juliette Greco. Little Black Existentialisthood. As she slipped out, I saw her ankle, slender as a twig.

For days I couldn't stop thinking about her. Like a child. Nothing of the female about her save for her utter delicacy. Soft, long, long brown hair. A sweet mournful face. Then a triangle of black, no arms. A child's thin legs, nothing ankles, and black elf shoes.

It's like a month later I'm sitting at the bar in the West End Tavern, brooding over my beer. She glides in though the revolving door. I turn, swiveling the long back way around on my stool, riveted as she passes. She glides past me oblivious, but glides straight up to Jack, sitting just a few stools past me.

Jack was not my friend. Jack was a faggot. Jack wouldn't leave me along. Jack even came into my dorm room, ignoring my disinvitation, slid his hand under my blanket as I drew back in bed, screaming at him to leave. Jack was a grad student, also specializing in English. Jack worked for CU: one of the many jobs universities keep students poor with.

My elf whispered to Jack. She glided out. Thump, thump went the revolving door.

Never before had I approached Jack. I ignored Jack. Now I bee-lined for him. "Jack, Jack. Please. Tell me. Who is she?"

"Oh, no," says Jack. "SybaRight? Not you? Surely you can't be that stupid."

"Who is she? You know her?"

I no longer remember her name. I'm going to say Robin. I think it may actually have been Robin. "SybaRight, SybaRight. Don't tell me you've fallen in love with the biggest bull dyke in New York. You'll stay away from Robin if you know what's good for you."

"No, no. You damn faggot. You pervert everything around you."

The next time I saw Robin she was with Jan. First time I ever saw Jan. If you think dyke, you'll picture Jan.

"Don't be an ass," Jack told me. "Jan is the femme; Robin is the bull."

Robin never met my stare. But Jan did. I became friends with Jan. But not before being visited in the elevator of a friend's apartment building by a horde of dykes in black leather jackets cum steel studs, etc. I stand there. The door opens. I start to enter. They suddenly appear, hold the door open, let themselves all in. As we rise, they take out switch blades. Click them open. I made no response. Got out at my floor. They all stayed behind, staring malevolently. But after that non-display, they left me alone. And Jan became friendly. Would accept my invitations to watch the sun rise over Morningside Park. Even gave me a nice back massage in my mother's Buick one night. But Robin I could never even make eye contact with.

I stopped worrying about Robin after seeing her at a party in the Village maybe a year later. Downtown in the Whitehorse Tavern I was friendly with a knockout red head. Cathy: as Irish as red heads come in New York (with an astonishing set of milk-jugs, let me tell you). (Currently German owned, the Whitehorse was highly Celtic in atmosphere.) Big bosomed, big drinker. Cathy worked as an artists model when she worked. She had a loft down on Bleeker Street, next block from the building with the Louis Sullivan facade. Some Whitehorse people were there and a bunch I'd never seen before. "I'm an artist. What are you: poet, artist, actor ...?" What bullshit. Clearly the guy works in an advertising agency. "I'm a poet," I answer.

Guys would come in and jump on her, pushing Cathy over backwards onto the bed, humping her with all their cloths on. Cathy would hump back, say she was glad they could come. Mostly I saw her with a particular guy, also named Jack, lived on West 114^th Street. Made his living running poker games. He supplied the place, the booze, the sandwiches: he took 10% of the pot.

Stupid Village party. Some clown there, decent looking black guy, was trying to convince everyone how serious he was about Zen. And in comes Robin.

Same outfit. Maybe she had a closet full of little black capes and little black shoes and skinny black hose. There were a jillion good looking women at this party. Our hostess looked like she was going to be busy. I'd always assumed that I'd fuck Cathy someday. She regularly came on to me when she was with other guys: just wait till she came on to me when she was solo. Never happened. Right now it's my job to just be there, wait till one of these dewy dames shows an interest in me. As I said, I play the female role, not the male. But with Robin there, I didn't have a chance. Robin went and stood against a wall. Within minutes every unattached female in the place was sticking to her like filings to a magnet. I watched, fascinated. Robin did my thing better than I ever did. But I couldn't tell how (any more than another could tell how I did it. (I couldn't either).) Clearly the girls didn't know what they were getting into. Or did they? If they wanted their pussy sucked, I wasn't into that yet. Robin certainly wasn't going to get them pregnant. And they didn't look to be concerned about disease. But maybe they had no such thoughts. Do dogs know what's attracting them when they follow a pheromone trial?

Suddenly I decided I had had enough. Clearly Jack was right. Robin was a chief bull dyke of New York. I was tired. I went home. I never saw Robin, or Jan, or any of them again.

I'm sad to say that I did see Cathy again: many years later. She was walking down Claremont Avenue where it curves into 116^th Street, looking far older than the actual number of years should have added. She was bickering, arguing with herself, and violently wiping dust or whatever from her sleeve, from her hands. Lady Macbeth. The Madwoman of Chaillol. God, and she'd been so zophtic, so full of life and fun before. Who knows? Maybe she was thirty-five when I'd thought she was twenty-five. That still wouldn't add up to her being eighty. The Portrait of Doreen Grey.

There. Three women. Dyke, dyke, nyphomaniac. And I never fucked a one of them.