Sex for America: Politically Inspired Erotica (24 page)

Now, here, inside, the chants were amplified with strange echoes. We were in the very center of the star in the center of the room under the dome of the Texas Capitol. “NO MORE WAR! NO MORE WAR!” Good and rhythmic. I rocked my hips slightly to push my clit into Jenna’s face. On her knees, she still had to bend over to reach; standing up, she was strong, tall, goddess-like, with a James Dean sneer. Jenna’s black T-shirt—we’d made hundreds of them and still had boxes and boxes left to sell—said, “
VISUALIZE BURNING POLICE CARS
,” in stark white letters. Even on her knees to me, Jenna still pissed me off. She wasn’t submissive in every line of her body, like Mosh was. There was no sweetness. Jenna was all about a “whatever” brand of defiance. I felt even more defiance rise up in me and run right down hot into my cunt.

I looked around the room at the oil portraits of governors, the bronze plaques explaining history, the flags. I felt that I was at the heart of political power, and that heart was empty. Real power was somewhere else. Where? What was powerful? I was power, getting my boots and cunt licked by the fiercest activists in Austin. The rotunda of governors watched us benevolently as I grabbed Jenna’s stiff-gelled mohawk and mashed into her face harder as if she were some sort of perverted merry-go-round horse made specially for me to masturbate on. Was anyone going to notice us? Could we get arrested for this? A few people had walked through—even a guard, and a woman in a power suit. The muffled echoing ap- proach and fade of clicky heeled shoes. I looked up overhead the way I’d look at the moon if it were nighttime. The dome was glori-

ous, huge, intricate. It could be a cathedral and we, a sleazy, dykey trio fucking right on the altar, on the Lone Star itself, deep in the heart of Texas. It was beautiful.

“Come on,” I said. “Enough of this. Let’s find the bathroom.”

The chanting followed us through the hallways as we followed the signs. My cunt was wet and slippery next to the rough seams inside my pants. Mosh looked scared and trustful, like a little kid. “I can’t believe you just DID that,” she said in a whispery way. Her eyes were huge. For a supposedly tough butch dyke, when she went under, she really went under. She was regressing weirdly. “What if someone beat us up. Or something.”

“Whatever. They’re all too busy watching the circus out- side.”

“Shouldn’t we be out there? I mean, the protest . . .” Mosh said guiltily.

Jenna snorted. “What, does it make you feel bad? Shouldn’t you be out there right now? Is that going to do any good? You think Mommy Honorary Lesbian Anne Richards is going to listen to us? You think she can beat the oil boys? She couldn’t even win against the biggest hick loser governor this state will ever see. Clayton fucking Williams! Ha! Fuck! Protest! Fucking fat lot of good it’s going to do. We should be blowing shit up. Protest.”

“I know, but maybe it will . . . and the media’s covering it . . . and I’m missing CLASS . . .” She was getting whiny now. Soon she’d start blaming me for something and try to pick a fight. It was definitely time to fuck her. Preemptive fucking was the best strategy to make her shut up about money or her exams or how I loved Jenna best or how I wasn’t a good enough top or how we’d left her out of the scene. “Maybe we should go back OUT there.

It’s important to have a queer presence for the media . . . so that the world knows we’re against the war . . .”

Jenna and I looked slyly at each other. She could read my mind on this point. I knew that, to her, we were both whiny, spoiled, middle-class bitches who bought our clothes at Contempo and Macy’s instead of finding them in Dumpsters in back of the Army Surplus store like she did. All I asked was that she should channel her class hatred of me into really fucking hot sex.

“As IF it’s going to make a difference,” I hissed, slamming Mosh up against the wall of the handicapped stall. “Fucking idiot. Little hypocrite. You don’t care if there’s a war; you’re at this stupid protest because I’m here. All you can do is stare at how my tits are hanging out.” Jenna got behind her and grabbed her arms. We all wrestled for a minute, breathless. I yanked down Mosh’s pants and started spanking her as hard as I could. No warmup.

“Ow! Sir! Ow! Ow What Did I Do, Sir?” she yelped.

“What did you do? Fucked around! Fucked around protest- ing for PETA and going to class like a good little girly-girl! Shit!” “Ow! I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’ll do better next time! Oh

please!”

Jenna started laughing and chimed in. “I bet you didn’t even vote. Did you vote? Did you vote for Ann Richards?”

There was no answer. Just distant chanting.

“Voting is fucking stupid anyway,“ Jenna said. She spanked harder, in rhythm. The little metal anarchy buttons and air force pins on her jacket were clanking against each other. Mosh held on for dear life to the metal grab-bar. I held Mosh’s face with one hand, nipped her little wire-rimmed glasses into my vest pocket,

and carefully slapped her. Not like I’d hit Jenna. If we’d been alone I’d have choked her and punched her.

“I’m sorry! And I have a car! I’m part of the problem! I should ride my bike more!” Mosh whined as Jenna and I both slapped her around the bathroom stall. Her pants were down around her ankles and her ass was deep pink with slap marks. “Guys! We have to stop. We’re going to get arrested! What if there’s security cameras! This could ruin my career!”

Maybe she was right. But I didn’t care. I wanted to get ar- rested. I didn’t want us to be so safe. There was a war! I wanted to destroy something, to smash something, to light shit on fire. The police were pigs. The protesters were rainbow coalition hippies who signed petitions, stayed on the sidewalk, and didn’t see any difference between fighting for peace and fighting for hemp. They hated us for discrediting their movement.

“I don’t care if they arrest us. We might as well do something worth getting arrested for.”

“Nobody’s going to arrest us. God. You are both such dumb- asses,” Jenna said, panting with effort as she held Mosh’s wrists. “If you want to get arrested so bad, and you must, since you’re always fucking talking about it, go punch a cop in the face.” I couldn’t tell if she was serious. She said once that she loved me. Sometimes I believed her.

“No. Seriously. Let’s get out of here.”

“Fuck that and fuck the war and FUCK YOU!” I slammed her up against the stall door, with my shoulder smashing against her strapped-down tits. I unzipped my vest pocket and got out a glove. It was getting to the point finally where latex smelled like sex to me instead of hospitals. “Fuck staying on the sidewalk.” Mosh was wet

and hot and whimpering. She was almost fainting with lust. Jenna held her up, crouched, spooning around Mosh’s body, with NO BLOOD FOR OIL, NO BLOOD FOR OIL, helicopter thuds echo- ing through the granite halls and the tiled bathroom walls and the marble partitions between the bathroom stalls and the slick walls of Mosh’s cunt warm and throbbing as I worked my fist in there and slammed her over and over again up against Jenna’s soft body and bitterly thought of how real and live and warm our bodies were here safe in the Capitol Building and how we might die someday for something we believed in but not now because real death and oppression were far away from us three and our campus and our city. I took my despair and Mosh’s guilt and Jenna’s fierce anger and turned it into fucking. The war became my war and my chant was “Fucking bitch, you want it so bad” and I wanted it, too. I raped Mosh in the bathroom like a drunk teenager on a joyride driving down the highway the wrong way at a hundred miles an hour. I became a piece of a machine that worked until it broke without ever knowing why, I fucked her like a demon of vengeance punishing the guilty in hell. Our war would never end, anyway, even if the real war did. I loved her so hard because she was soft and breakable. I loved the way she had a car and a two-room apartment to herself. I wanted to fuck her so hard that it would protect her from ever be- ing fucked over, like a force field of fucking that didn’t care how it got where it got, a joy that came out of bitterness. Everything I was afraid someone might do to us: I wanted to do that.

Jenna leaned down to kiss me. She bit my lips so hard I could smell my own blood. And I didn’t care that it wasn’t safe, because I loved her death wish so much it was almost mine. That little bit of blood was a small thing to worry about compared to a war.

THE LAST SOCIALIST
‌

PETER ORNER

This was in Raleigh during the drought of ’93. We lived across
the street from a Buick dealer and I’d lie for hours on the couch on the porch and watch the new cars gleam in the sun. My Firenza didn’t gleam. She’d come home from a run and be appalled by my idleness all over again. By the end of us, September, she’d stopped bothering to be disgusted.

I remember. She’d stand and hold open the door with one hand and take her shoes off with the other. Her face bright red, her neck, her hair sweat-stuck to her ears
.
How can you just lie there, all day every day? The only activity I hadn’t given up hope on was sex. But even for this it was too hot in Raleigh. One night, at three in the morning, we went to an IHOP because of the air

conditioning and she gave me a merciful hand job using the oil from the vinegar-and-oil rack on the table.

Another night, the sweat pooling in the hollow of our mat- tress, I said, “I could lie beside you like a Sunday roast.”

“Where’d you steal that line from?” “I forget.”

She raised her head and kissed me daintily as a small reward. For stealing? For forgetting? Then she fell asleep. The overhead light was on. She said she needed it on to read. She always brought a small tower of books with her to bed. She said she was only studying political science as precursor to overthrow. I stood up on the bed and yanked the cord.

“What are you doing? I’m reading.” “You’re not reading. You’re sleeping.” “Turn it back on.”

I stood back up and yanked the cord again. Then she quoted, without opening her eyes, from the book she’d been reading. “Power cannot be looked forward to or else it is looked forward to indefinitely.” Sartre quoting Marx. It was too fucking hot to respond.

“I love you,” I said.

“
Vera Zassolich
,” she cried to the ceiling. “What?”

“Vera Zassolich. In 1876 she shot General Trepov after the trial of the hundred and eighty-three populists.”

“Killed him?”

“Maimed, but good enough. Not sixteen and she started a revolution. Viva!”

“Viva,” I said.

“Fuck me,” she said. “Fuck me like a hero.” “Like a proletarian hero?”

“Yes. And then go. Will you?” “Tonight?”

“Tonight, tomorrow, next week. Just go.”

She was naked. I was naked save for my hat. If we could have torn off our skins we would have. I wish I could report the exul- tancy of the rapturous upheaval. But even in my memory we’re like two wet seals thumping. We kept losing our grip on our slippery asses. Two and half minutes, tops. She groaned and rolled off me. She said, “You’re no Daniel Ortega.” Went back to reading.

Later she got up and took a shower. I stared at the bulb above the bed and listened. We had very low water pressure that sum- mer. All of Raleigh did, according to the
News and Observer
. I stared at the bulb and thought of the water slowly landing on her, slinking down her neck, her shoulders, her breasts, leaping off her pistol nipples into the abyss of the drain.

MY MOST MEMORABLE ENCOUNTER
‌

SUSAN O’ DOHERTY

My friend Sherina says I don’t know how to act or dress since
I don’t have a mother, but she is wrong about that. I have had more mothers than most. There is the one that everyone calls my “real” mother, but she doesn’t feel real to me because we don’t know where she is. My sister, Maura, thinks our “real” mother is coming back for us, but Maura has many problems and this isn’t her story. Then there is the mother I have now, Mamie Slattery, who actually counts twice because she gave us back to the agency after Maura set the fire, but now I’m hers again. In between we had Mama Julie, where Maura still stays.

Even so, Sherina is right, I’m not good at girl things. I do have lots of girl friends, mostly because I’m good in school and

don’t mind giving the answers away. My friends try to help me with dressing and what to say to boys, but it’s never exactly right. With clothes, either I’m too dressy or too sloppy, or I mix styles that everyone knows don’t go together; and with boys I either can’t think of anything to say or I can’t stop talking, showing myself in an unattractive light.