Like a Dog. Tara Jepsen
all.
We have to haul ass back to San Francisco because Peter is mandated by the court to attend three Narcotics Anonymous meetings a week. He’s had to do this before, so I’m not convinced it’s a fool-proof cure. But it’s probably good, regardless. He found a meeting that’s all men who were super fucked up on drugs, and one doesn’t even have his left arm anymore because he ruined it shooting up. Peter’s not supposed to tell me this stuff, but it makes him really giggly and he doesn’t tell me names.
We make it back in time, and I drop him off at the meeting on 24th Street in the Mission. I go home to my place and drink three beers in a row, hungrily, like I’ve been deprived. I watch Pretty Woman, one of the best movies ever. I fall asleep without brushing my teeth, a beer propped on my stomach. I wake up two hours later and it’s spilled all over my shirt and bed, sticky and annoying. I dump a glass of water on my bed to dilute the beer and then put a towel over it and fall back asleep.
“What up?” I text my friend Irma.
“Dude come out with me,” she says, “I’ll pick you up in two hours.”
“Where are we going?”
“These writer kids are having a fundraiser at a sex club.”
“Oh god.”
“It’ll be funny. Come on. It’s an all-gender play party!”
“You have to buy my ticket.”
“Done.”
A couple hours later, Irma and I park on Market Street two blocks down from Sensations, a gay men’s sex club. Normally they wouldn’t let women in, but they’ve programmed a special night for all genders to raise money for a group of queer writers to go on tour. When we arrive, there’s a registration table in the lobby. There’s a heavy black curtain shielding the entrance to the club. Irma pays fifty dollars for the two of us, and then we push into the back. She’s wearing black leather pants and has a ball gag tied to her belt. She’s six feet tall, and unapologetically still deep in ’90s sex fetishes. Her face could be read as any gender, and she half-forms the words that slop out of her mouth. She’s one of those people that loves dogs so passionately that you know there is a psychic wound inside her that will never heal. We’ve been friends since we were seventeen, which means for about sixteen years now. There are a few guys sitting on the couches in the lobby, wearing little towels around their waists and chatting. The room could just as easily be a down-to-earth hang-out room for Lutheran teens to discuss volleyball tourneys. But the cooler of protein-heavy bodybuilding drinks, the minimal attire, and the cock drawings by a novice local artist mounted and priced on the wall tell a different story. We find stairs leading to a second floor. We walk into a glory hole maze made of thin red plywood. A few people are standing nearby. One couple is making out, while one gives the other a handjob. Another guy is using the glory holes the way god intended: to let his dong wait for a willing and anonymous sucker. I see a guy stop, appraise the dick, and decide to be of service. To our left, there are two rooms which each have a leather swing. In one, Irma’s ex-girlfriend Mystique is being fisted by a butch in boxer shorts and a sports bra. She cries out loudly. We walk down a hallway to another room that set up like a fake hospital. It feels like a soap opera set from the seventies. There is a woman lying on an exam table completely naked, with a fully shaved beaver. She has several labia piercings, and it gives me a sharp shot of pain through my vagina to look at. Actually, anything painful that I see on another person’s body makes pain shoot through my vagina. Especially gnarly scabs. When my grandma was alive and would get big bruises on her paper-thin skin, it would feel like a gymnast was doing a floor routine on my pelvic muscles. Anyway, a very serious masculine person attends to her with a vast menu of piercing needles. The serious needler wears a black leather vest with nothing underneath and black leather pants, and whenever she moves, there is a jingle from her waist, which is laden with chains. The room is very quiet, in great deference to this act of gravity: piercing.
I lean over to Irma and whisper, “Lifestyles.” She snorts. The butch’s head whips in our direction.
“Shush,” they say. I get shame-faced and unable to stifle giggles. Irma grabs my arm and pulls me away.
“There’s a steam room downstairs,” Irma tells me.
“Is it the blowingest blow job church of all time?” I ask.
“Probably.”
“Hot. Let’s go.”
We get downstairs and notice little cubbies where people can stash their clothes. We both decide to get naked and go in, sitting on white towels so as to protect the gateways to our interiors.
“So who’s the crush who drew you to this party?” I ask Irma.
“What!”
“I know how you work.”
“This girl Lila. She didn’t say she’s coming for sure, though. I want to hang out with you!”
“Dude, I don’t care, just do your thing.”
“Are you like boning anybody right now?”
“Nah. Not feeling like it.”
“You’re always feeling like it! You love limerence!”
“I got burned out on that a while ago.”
We lean back and inhale the steam. I notice a dude let another dude’s hand slide under his towel and commence jacking him off. I inhale deeply, feeling the steam lightly burn the inside of my nose.
My brother and I are driving up to our parents’ house in Calistoga for their anniversary. Weaving along Mark West Springs Road into town, I watch the manzanita branches twist around the hillside with their dark green leaves, draped with the beautiful Spanish moss that’s killing the trees. The grasses and weeds are burned dark yellow, and deer graze up the embankment of one of the curves we round past the Petrified Forest. Our parents live right in town, a couple blocks off Lincoln, the main street. It is a community-theater-level suburban setting. Ranch house after ranch house flanked by lawns and rose bushes. A clear and present lack of innovation. We park in the driveway and go in through the garage, which has long been too cluttered to hold an actual car. Instead, there are bicycles, tools, cases of soda and stacks of old magazines filling the void. Inside my dad and mom are both asleep on the couch in front of the TV, which murmurs the narration to a game of golf. I find these games absurdly soothing, in a tranquil, pastoral way. A green expanse so stupid you need cacophonous abuse from the outside world to make you crave its stillness.
I sit down on the couch between my mom and dad and put my arms around them. Peter takes a photo with his phone. My mom’s eyes flutter open and she hugs me. Despite our movement, my dad remains asleep. His cocktail glass is empty on the table next to him.
“Let me put dinner on,” my mom says. “Or do you want to do it?” She giggles and walks away, the big joke being that we all know I’m a terrible cook.
My brother hugs my mom, then goes into the next room, which is an auxiliary family room next to the family room. He turns on another TV kinda loud. I can’t tell what he’s watching but there’s a lot of gunfire and booming noises. I’m annoyed that he has separated himself already. I stand in the doorway and look at him while he watches the screen. He doesn’t even look at me.
“You don’t want to hang out with us?” I ask. He doesn’t answer. To some degree, I think I’ve always been afraid of him. He is a tangle of mood swings and quick rage. He looks up at me, then back to the TV.
“Come sit down,” he says. I walk over and sit next to him. “You are a tense little wombat,” he says. I sit quietly and absorb the weirdness of our functioning relationship. He takes my hand and holds it. We watch violent TV until my mom calls us to eat.
I shake my dad by the shoulder to wake up and eat with us. He rips a loud snore and turns his head away from me. I shake harder until his eyes crack open and he looks around. He registers my face. He gets up and makes himself another drink.
At