Fist of the Spider Woman (14 page)

“Is zat a yes, or am I going to have to shoot you?” Sido aims the gun at my head.

“It's a yes.”

Sido gestures for me to stand and tells me to go to the bathroom to get my electric toothbrush. She also directs me to bring a bottle of wine and the wine glass beside it. With my hands full, I can't defend myself. I do as she bids and climb slowly up into the loft. Sido follows behind.

“Pour us some wine,” she instructs once we're up there. She presses the barrel of the gun to my heart, and extends the glass she brought with her.

I fill her glass, then my own, and sit on the edge of the bed. She holds me at gunpoint while I drink.

“Take your clothes off, lie on zee bed, and open your legs,” Sido commands.

I do as she says. She kneels between my legs. Not for one second does she take the gun off me.

“Follow all my orders or I'll shoot you,” she warns. “Understand?”

“I understand,” I say, but I'm getting wet with Sido between my legs. She positions the handgun inside my cunt. My body just lets it slide in. Then she takes my electric toothbrush and turns it on. She holds the back of it to my clit. It vibrates against me and feels like a huge revving motor. It gets me to a place of stimulation without foreplay, without any tenderness whatsoever. A large orgasm explodes out of me.

After a while, Sido withdraws the gun from my cunt and looks at me expectantly.

I'm feeling like I might fall asleep any second.

“I knew you'd like dessert,” Sido says to me, smiling and pointing the handgun at her own head.

I struggle to focus on her. Everything is becoming fuzzy and my eyes are closing. I'm fighting hard, but I know it's a battle I'm going to lose. She doctored my wine.

I can't move. There's a gag in my mouth. Sido has tied me to the bed, using rope to fasten my wrists and legs to it.

The skylight is wide open, so I'm exposed to the outdoors.

High above is the dark Parisian night and the moon shining down upon me. Two owls are circling, their wailing, sinister cries getting closer.
Ha!
they repeat over and over again.

I can vaguely make out that a blanket is covering me. My vision momentarily comes into focus, and I see that it's not a blanket. I'm covered by dead mice. Sido is sitting by my side, taking one dead mouse carcass after another out of plastic bags, and laying their cold little cadavers on my naked body.

When I look at her, part of me still wants her. She's so beautiful.

Crabby

Michelle Tea

When Steph and I came back to Boston that summer, we started working for Madame Lynne again, and we moved into a one-room apartment in Provincetown, at the edge of Cape Cod. You couldn't really call it an apartment; it was just a single room.

I had crabs in my crotch. Pubic lice, down in my hair there. They didn't really itch. I was sitting on the toilet in the communal bathroom on the second floor that I had to share with everyone else in the house—the straight kids who drank and worked too much, the conservative gay guy with the even tan, the bleach-blonde dyke who worked at the leather store, and the quiet girl on the first floor with the boyfriend who stalked her. He often came to our house after the bars let out and banged on her door with the cast his broken arm was wrapped up in until one of the boys woke up and went down to talk to him down. And he would start crying really loud, just blubbering, half-yelling stuff, and somebody else would wake up and go across the street to the pay phone in the parking lot and finally call the cops. This happened all the time. The cops would gently escort him out of our house. Steph and I just listened to the whole thing from our futon and grumbled, “Jesus Christ.” We talked a little about how much we hated men, then went back to sleep.

But the bathroom, it was actually pretty clean considering how many people used it. I was sitting there peeing when I saw
it
and I thought it was just a fleck of nature, like a bit of seaweed from being in the ocean, or sand. And I looked at it and I picked at it. It seemed to stick to me, and I noticed it had legs, tiny ones poking out from its side like a crab. I made a swift connection between my pubic hair and this thing that actually really looked like a little fucking crab, and I screamed, “Steph!” She was upstairs hitting the bong. She said she knew right when she heard me scream like that, that I had crabs. She came
thump thump
thump
down the stairs then
rattle rattle
at the bathroom door.

I hopped off the toilet and waddled over with my underwear looped around my knees and pee dripping down my thighs, I unlatched the door and it felt like the dirtiest moment in the world.

I started crying like crazy, greeting Steph there at the threshold of my nightmare, dripping from my face and crotch. I gulped, “I think I have crabs.”

She said, “Get in there,” and pushed me back into the little bathroom—the temple of hygiene with its many faucets and soaps and foaming bottles. Steph locked the door and I plopped back on the bowl.

I hadn't really had many moral twinges about me and Steph's prostitution, none of the failing self-esteem and self-worth that were supposed to accompany a girl into such a profession. It was too easy. I would look into the mirror and think,
I am a prostitute
, and wait for an appropriate wave of horror and revulsion.

I would wait and wait and feel nothing.

But this was like all the pangs of guilt and conscience I never had took the form of parasitic bugs and burst forth from my crotch.
That's what you get
, I thought. Steph crouched by the bowl and poked around at me, pinching a small monster out with her fingertips. “Yup, you have crabs.”

“Steph,” I sobbed. “They really look just like little crabs!”

She hiked up her hippie dress and brought her pantiless crotch over to my face. “Do you see anything, do you see anything?” I searched through her hair like my mother checking my head for nits in kindergarten. I remember she had a certain comb for it, white plastic, and how poisonous the shampoo smelled—it was called Kwell, a word that sounds like a bug. The whole neighbourhood and extended family had gathered in my kitchen for the big soap, my head bent into the sink, suffocating beneath the shampoo fumes and water. My grandparents were there; it was a real big deal. Afterward, all the adults sat around drinking tea and chain-smoking, speculating on which filthy child could have passed me the bugs. “They jump,” my grandmother kept saying. I imagined them with small and powerful legs, big as the magnified picture that came with the shampoo instructions.

“Soap and water don't cost nothing,” my mother clucked, disgust in her voice.

“Soap costs,” I protested, sticking my long wet hair into my nose, breathing the awful stink of it.

“Anyone can afford soap,” my mother insisted. “It doesn't cost anything to be clean.” They went on about who let their kids run around wild and how Chelsea was going to hell.

It was all about dirt in this really moral, really virtuous way, and it was what I sat with, trapped in the bathroom in Province-town as Steph ran down to Adam's Pharmacy to buy razors.

What else did I know about lice, about crabs? They were evidence of betrayal.

After my parents divorced, but before my father disappeared— just before I hit my teen years—we were attempting to have a very 1980s divorced family, a visit-dad-on-the-weekends situation, but Dad was such a jerk—a couple cans of Miller from the fridge, and he'd start trying to pry information out of us: Who was our mother's boyfriend, did he sleep over, did he buy her the car he'd seen her driving—a powder-blue Escort with a hatchback— and who said I could go to Chelsea High and not Pope John or Saint Rose, why wasn't that discussed with him? He was my father. Did I discuss it with my mother's boyfriend? And my breathing got all funny and I noticed the faster I breathed the funnier I felt in my head, and it was like when I forgot to eat in the summer and then went out riding my bike until I saw spots in front of my eyes and fell over. I figured if I kept breathing faster and funnier I'd pass out and my dad would have to leave me alone. “Jesus Christ,” he sounded annoyed. Through my fuzzy eyes I could see my sister looking panicked, and I wished she would get it and faint with me so we could go home, and Dad would be the big asshole for bothering his daughters until they were sick with it. I feigned unconsciousness for a few minutes. I was sprawled on that weird piece of furniture, Dad's first bachelor pad acquisition, sort of a couch but long like a bed and covered in long orange fake fur. It looked a bit like a sports car.

I came to, and he called us a cab.

Madeline, my sister, was so upset and excited, she burst into our house shouting, “Michelle passed out!” Breathlessly she explained it all to Ma while I stood there and tried to look dizzy.

Ma got right on the phone to Dad, and they had a huge fight.

I slipped into my bedroom and quietly lifted my powder-blue telephone—same colour as the new Escort. I placed the phone to my ear and heard him call her a douche bag. “Don't you talk to her like that!” I yelled at him.

“Michelle, get off the phone!” they both hollered at me. And Ma was crying. Things rose into hysteria quickly at my house, a manic, buoyant heat. My mother was crying, which meant I couldn't. We couldn't all be crying. She hung up the phone, the beige one that hung on the wall in the kitchen.

She went into the bathroom and sat there on the toilet, leaving the door open. Her white nurse's uniform was hiked up her thighs, a wad of toilet paper waiting in her hand. She blotted her teary face with it. “Are you okay?” she asked. I nodded.

“You're not going to faint again?” She seemed nervous about it.

I couldn't tell if I'd faked it or if it had been real.

“I'm okay,” I said. I wanted her to shut the bathroom door, so

I could steal one of her cigarettes and smoke it.

“I don't want to turn you against your father,” she said, which meant she was about to tell me something good. “I'll tell you everything that happened when you're older. I don't want to talk badly about him, he's still your father,” she stalled.

“Ma, it's okay, I don't even like him.” It was true. Dad was rapidly becoming the biggest jerk in the world. It was hard to forgive him for kicking us all out of our house, hard to visit him and see the room that used to be mine, empty now but for a few cardboard boxes—a half-assed storage space. In his new living room I'd watched MTV on the colour television, but we were watching a miniscule black-and-white job back at our new place. A small screen of static. Dad had cable. There was Mick Jagger, walking his weird turkey-walk through some inner-city neighbourhood. “I ain't waiting on a lady,” he sang. “I'm just waiting on a friend.”

“That's my song,” Dad said bitterly, his words coming out on a cloud of exhaled Vantage. “Not waiting for a lady.”

He scared me then, the contempt in his voice when he said “lady,” the lift of the beer can to his wide, Polish mouth. Now, looking back, I'm struck by his ability to be moved by a rock song, that he was listening hard enough to hear the lyrics through the nasal British accent, that he related. The song comforted him in his evil, alcoholic mood. He was standing behind the bar he'd bought when Ma convinced him that we should at least have the living room furniture. We got the scratchy floral couch and the rickety armchair. He replaced it with a bar and the weird fluffy sofa-bed-thing. On the bar sat a box of Andes mints, the only food in the house. Later we'd go out for a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and eat it on the floor in front of the television. For now I sucked on the cool, minty chocolates. It was the last time we visited Dad.

“When you kids were little he gave me crabs,” Ma finally said. “He said that I gave them to him.” Ma was really crying now, wiping at her cheeks with the toilet paper. “I was always faithful to him,” she said, and I believed her. She gulped and sobbed.

Probably she never got to really cry about it. “Don't you ever spread your legs for anybody!” she yelled. Not angrily, just to get her point across. I nodded and slipped a cigarette slyly from her pack.

Steph came back to the bathroom with a little paper bag. It had plastic razors in it—pink for girls—and also a can of girl-scented shaving cream, a pearly-pink gel that lathered into a soapy paste. “Oh God!” I cried more, looking at the stuff. I just wanted something to come and make the crabs be gone. Make them never have been there.

“I'm going to shave too,” Steph said. Steph was such a martyr.

There weren't any bugs in her crotch. I could never have a tragedy of my own; she was always trying to one-up me. “I could have eggs,” she insisted. We tried to remember if we'd seen any of the same tricks. We slept in the same bed, but we never had sex anymore. I was sure she didn't have the crabs.

We crowded naked into the shower, which was like an aluminum closet. There was barely room for us both. To get at the tricky places we had to stretch our legs out onto the bathroom floor, getting the whole place wet. Steph was scared of the razor, but I understood you couldn't just lop your clit off the way she feared. I brought the razor down over my pubic bone, instantly clogging it with thick curls I then had to dig from the metal and fling into the drain. I hated Steph for blubbering. You really couldn't have something shitty happen to you without her stealing all the glory. I just wanted to die thinking about those gross things latched onto my skin with their little teeth, drinking my blood.

“I quit,” I said to Steph. “I'm not going to whore anymore.”

“I'm not quitting,” Steph snapped, getting all tough on me.

She plunged the razor bravely into her wet hair. “They're just bugs.” It would all be another battle scar for Steph, one more way for her to lord it over the rest of the world who would never know hardship the way she had known hardship. She tossed a soggy mat of hair to the floor and squirted more shaving gel into her palm. She bent down to inspect my work. “You got to get all of it,” she said, pointing to the stubble. “That's where the eggs are.” I lathered up and scraped some more. My skin was raw beneath the metal. “No, you really got to get rid of it,” she said when my razor brought away nothing.