I was new in San Francisco and screwed up inside. I was living in a white Ford Fiesta with a blue stripe along the doors, parked on top of a hill above the Castro District, wheels lodged against the curb. I had a blanket (a present from my ex-fiancée), a bicycle, a bag of clothes and a few boxes of paper that I thought represented something important stuffed below the windowpane. And in retrospect they did, but not what I thought.
I'd only been in San Francisco a couple of days. I had run out of gas on the Oakland Bay Bridge on the way into town and the emergency worker that showed up in a big padded truck asked if I had a death wish. I could barely hear him with the wind so loud and the cars racing over the bay. I had to yell to explain that the gas gauge was broken, that I usually got three hundred miles to the tank, but this tank had only gotten two hundred and fifty for some reason. He pushed me onto Treasure Island and injected my car with an electric pump, which forced a quart of gas straight through the hoses and into the engine. I'd been driving aimlessly in the desert for weeks and hadn't had a conversation with someone in what seemed like a long time.
The San Francisco sky was beautiful and full of fog as the ocean air drifted across the city. It was nearly summer. Tufts of cloud hung on the edges of the peaks like cotton caught on a drainpipe. The fog made the colors pop, and the rows of pink and green pastel houses lining the hills had the quality of a painting, like something too perfect to have happened by accident. Nothing felt real, and I wondered if I would stay once I found a job and made some money. I was running out of places to go.
I went to a poetry reading and met a poet there. Diana had braided black hair, dyed in streaks of orange and pink. She was taller than me by four inches and had a broad, strong back. Her poems were the angry screeds of a victim returning home with a box of matches and a can of lighter fluid. Her anger was ravenous, and her words mixed with a sadness and self-loathing that ran straight to the bone. In her combat boots, motorcycle jacket and tar-stained jeans, she was beautiful.
It was late on a Sunday, and there weren't many people in the sharply lit windows of the buses and trolleys clattering down Market Street. After the reading we found our way to a punk rock bar with several rows of hardwood tabletops and a solid jukebox full of Pixies and Ramones. There were five or six people belly up at the rail, which is where we sat. The bar was not well lit, but there was enough light to see by.
Diana told me she was living with her girlfriend and would be for a long time. She presented this to me defiantly, like it would change my mind about something. But I didn't care. It had been six months since I'd left my fiancée. Diana said she had been an editor for a big magazine but now was
Diana gripped me tightly and pulled, letting her thumbnail scratch the tip of my penis.
unemployed and taking pills. I told her I had won a poetry slam back in Chicago. We were both dissatisfied with our current predicaments, not because they were bad, but because they were insulting. We were better than the world was willing to admit. I asked her if she wanted to add a shot to her beer, and she said she did.
After a few drinks, I slid my hand between her legs. Not inside her jeans, outside, rubbing the denim seam with the bridge of my hand, forcing her zipper against her pelvis. "Oh, we're doing that," she said, and unzipped my pants and pulled my penis out and started stroking me below the bar. The bartender looked over at us once, then glanced away. Diana gripped me tightly and pulled, letting her thumbnail scratch the tip of my penis. I thought she was going to tear my skin. I was so lonely that I laid my head on her cold leather shoulder.
I thought, Yes, this is San Francisco. Before San Francisco I'd spent twelve hours on a Moab park bench, unable to move. Moab is in southern Utah, home of the slickrock bike trail and lots of Nike commercials. Before that I spent four months as a ski bum in the Rocky Mountains. Those giant outdoor athletic parks are places where the men outnumber the women seven to one. I was fresh out of a two-and-a-half-year relationship which had broken everything inside of me, and I was still running from that.
I kept a hand on my drink. Diana yanked my belt buckle and unbuttoned my pants, forced her large hand down further around my balls and gave a quick, solid squeeze. I let out a cry and pressed my face into her hair, but nobody seemed to care. I zipped back up and left my empty glass as I followed her drunkenly, belt still undone, into the ladies' room.
What I loved most was her size. She was proportionally Amazon, thin but with enormous breasts, wide hips and Marine shoulders. She was so much bigger than me it seemed she could fit me in her pocket.
Diana forced me up against the back of the stall, her forearm on my neck, her hand inside my shirt. She kissed me hard. "What do you want?" she asked, pulling away and yanking my shirt over my head.
"Hit me," I said. Or I might have said, "Hurt me" or something else. But whatever I said was lost in the fabric; she didn't hear me right. She thought I said "Choke me" and gripped my throat, squeezing my windpipe shut. My breath was gone and I saw stars as she pulled on me frantically. "Come on," she said. "C'mon. C'mon." I felt my legs go as the screws and beams rattled in their bearings and then I came all over the stall.
I was lying on the cool pink bathroom floor and she was sitting on the toilet, her pants bunched over her boots. I ran my fingers gently across her laces while she peed. The bathroom door opened and closed several times but nobody said anything. That's the kind of city San Francisco is.
"I want to see you again," I said. It was easy for me. I didn't know anyone, and I had nothing to lose.
Diana snatched sheets of toilet paper and rubbed them quickly between her legs. She looked down on me with something resembling guilt, but not quite, rather the realization of two ideas that don't exactly contradict but affect and enhance each other. She didn't like me anymore. I was desperate and lost, and she had problems of her own.
"Usually, I'm a lesbian," she said, looking away, flushing the toilet.
At that point, I didn't know that I would stay in San Francisco for seven years and see Diana many more times. We'd become friends but not lovers, and one winter day, on our way to catch some acquaintances at a party, she would ask me to wait with her outside the building, then force her entire fist into my mouth. At the time, on the bathroom floor, I was pretty sure I wouldn't meet her again; I didn't know where I'd be. I leaned toward the tip of her boot, sniffing the old leather of her shoe. n°
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Stephen Elliott is the author of six books, including the novel Happy Baby and the story collection My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up.
