The (Lost) Lisa Diaries

Adam thinks he’s in love with me now. He threw up, that’s how he figured it out. He said he acted “weird” at first because he was thinking, She’s probably so used to people kissing her ass, I’m not going to give her the satisfaction. I said, “Well, you were so busy trying to give the impression that you weren’t impressed with me that you ended up giving me the impression you weren’t impressed with me! Why shouldn’t you be impressed? I was impressed with you, I told you so. I like attention as much as anyone, and you withheld for months.”
    And now it’s too late — I’m stalking a new weirdo. Jerry Wick. I have fantasies all day long, where he starts trying to tell somebody something and I say, “Shut up, Jerry,” and then we get in a fight and I kick him in the shin and then we have sex. You know, one of my finer qualities is that no woman has to worry about me stealing her boyfriend, because if anyone did have a boyfriend obnoxious enough for me to like, she’d be glad to get rid of him. Here’s my song about Jerry:

    Jerry Wick, Jerry Wick
    The people say he’s a prick.
    “He’s a prick, that Jerry Wick!
    The things he does — that guy is sick.”
    I love you, Jerry Wick—
    Bring your ear here for a lick.
    Jerry Wick, you are a prick.
    You make my heart go tick tick tick.

The Poltergeist Hump Dance
1 June 1998

Everybody in Columbus, it seemed, came out for Jenny Mae’s party: ex cons; a drug dealer clutching a medical bag and yelling at everyone to shut up; big-bottomed white girls who no one knew, saying, “Honey, go get me some more Wine Coolers”; Tom from the Cheeter Slicks; a couple cops who came to investigate the disturbance and decided to stay. I told Bela, who runs Anyway Records, that his shirt was “a fancy man’s shirt” and he ripped it clean off his body! It cost $60! The pretty house, filled with Jenny Mae’s paintings that have about a thousand colors each, was getting banged and dented. All these people were trying to get away from other people who wouldn’t let go.

Jenny Mae demonstrated “the poltergeist hump dance” and then she attacked her boss — a short, skinny, gay Haitian — with her boobies, then she lay on the floor and said to her big black Lab: “Chicken, kill Mommy — rip open her jugular. If you love Mommy, kill me right now.” It sounds sad when I write it, but it felt crazy unbounded happy at the time, like diving off a terribly high cliff or tree limb into a lake, and in a way you hate it, but it’s not like anything else — it’s more. The patio has just about every kind of plant I’ve ever seen in my life. Jenny Mae was telling me about getting beaten as a kid and how to make plants not die as we sipped our King of Beers.
    Someone told me Jerry was here. I stayed on the patio, he stayed wherever he was, for at least an hour. Jenny Mae reported that Jerry was “spruced up. It looks like he even took a shower.” At last a group of people brought me in and another group brought Jerry down from the upstairs and sat us on the couch side by side, not looking at each other and not saying anything. I couldn’t remember what he looked like. He laughed at something someone said and I snuck a peek; I saw that his teeth point in about ten different directions. He’s handsome but bruised-looking, and electric. I said to someone else that I was hungry, and Jerry jumped up. “I’ll make you my famous omelet!” he cried. “Jerry hasn’t cooked in four years,” Jenny Mae said. He rummaged in her refrigerator and there was nothing but wine, so he drank a bottle and got near my hand as if he would pick it up in his (but he didn’t) and said, “Let’s go to the store.”

Lisa & Jerry in a bar in Columbus at noon, July 1998

    In the parking lot outside Jenny Mae’s, people were doing cocaine. Jerry bought us a couple lines. It went up my nose and down my throat, where it turned into lavender liquid, and suddenly I could feel every individual piece of gravel under my feet. Jerry and I wandered through alleys under dark, heavy trees, saying everything. We love Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Thomas Wolfe (the old one, not Tom). We know the same lines by heart. I told him why he behaves as he does, he told me I’m not as perceptive as I think I am. The store was closing (it was 3 a.m.), but Jerry put his palms on the glass door and showed his erratic teeth in a big grin and the man let us in. We bought eggs, cheese, milk, and one rotten tomato (“They’re tastier that way.”). We noticed that a lot more things were broken when we returned to the party. Two hours it took Jerry to make the perfect omelet, and he hadn’t taken but one bite and Jenny Mae grabbed his plate out of his hands and threw it across the room. Then her husband threw a glass and we all ran out in the alley and smashed plates till 6 a.m., which I guess is the Columbus bedtime.
     We had Jenny Mae’s and her husband’s “marriage bed.” Jerry was moving into me and then he stopped, saying he needs sex to be mystical. Copulation, Jerry says, is for animals. I figured that was the cocaine talking, but then he said he is 31 years old and has had sex only ten times in his life, with seven different girls. That averages to 1.4 times per girl, which is exactly what we’ve managed thus far. As it turns out, Jerry was an altar boy till he was 18 and might need some extra-special treatment. I’m going to take care of him like the beaten Jenny Mae takes care of her difficult, hummingbird-attracting, hanging fuchsia.

Accidents and Messes
10 June 1998

Violet, my cat, was hit by a car (which then streaked off), her pelvis broken in three places. So I bought her a new pelvis, even though the operation cost $1,500 — the last of my inheritance from my mother. People thought it odd that I just didn’t put her to sleep and keep the money. But this is her home — if your life isn’t worth $1,500 in your own home, then what kind of a world is this? And now, confined to a box for two weeks, getting pills shoved down her throat three times a day, Violet is still purring. She’s alive. When I think of all the career opportunities I’ve missed due to taking care of cats and kids, all the strangers not explored, all the thoughts not completed . . . everything interrupted, sometimes I get frustrated. But when you see what all these accidents and messes are: so much life around you, life being had, not just gotten through, well, death is no longer so fearful a thing. Because you know all is right just the way it is — broken and half-repaired like that, and you know you’re doing right.

    That’s my day. In the night, Jerry (whose psychic pelvis is broken in at least three places) makes my phone ring, and his sweet, crackly voice breaks my dream like a thumb poking through very old, worn fabric. I try to remember what I wanted to tell him. He makes some comparison between the Bible and Soap Opera Digest. He says nobility is lost today. He has the gall to claim he is the last noble man! I’m a sucker for gall. As I am for crooked teeth. He says he changed his mind about slowness. Now what was it he said originally on the subject? Neither of us remembers. Our story goes in and out like the tide. My night self’s a five-slat fence fragment, easing out of the sand and floating on top of the water till it reaches the horizon. I go to sleep not like I’m losing awareness, but like I’m traveling to this sea that’s always there. And every time I’m here again, over and over and over again, the stars come out like they never didn’t shine for me to navigate by. Me the floating, broken fence glowing white in the sparkling, flowing night.

Bruised Fruit
28 June 1998

Back in Columbus, chasing Jerry from softball game to the corner store to the record store where he works. He has a master’s degree and his band is on Warner Brothers, but still he likes being behind the counter at that one store, twisting on that stool with the rusted metal base and the cracked plastic top, making it squeak; he likes to sass the customers, rest inside crossed forearms on the counter. Smoke. Rest. If Jerry were a woman, he’d be the kind whose children get taken away, but they still love her, dream of her. He’s like a forest or Mayan ruins or Los Angeles — something that goes on and on without me. He doesn’t notice me. I find myself punching him, tickling him, hogging the sidewalk in a desperate attempt to get him to brush against me — stuff twelve-year-olds do to the opposite sex. I feel goofy and desperate and totally turned on. With other boyfriends, we’d take little bites out of our sex life all day long, and its promise never could fully gestate. We never left it alone long enough to. With Jerry, if the sun is shining, his hands are somewhere other than on my body, and the promise of sex does ripen; it ripens till it’s so bruised and soft and sugary it might burst open on its own. At night, I follow him from bar to bar while he laughs and leans across the table to smack someone other than me and plays video crack and occasionally soliloquies but mostly says nothing — just puts that tense longing into every regular old loser activity he does, making it look like the most crazy, wonderful thing anyone ever did, and then the longing is in me. Finally, around three, we end up back at his one-room pad, where he explains that he wants to fly a plane or some other desperate revelation (funny I can never remember his actual words); somehow that’s an excuse for not having sex with me.

    “You don’t know how to go slow!” he told me on the last hour of my last night there, my very last chance to be penetrated. Indeed I don’t. Jerry squeezed our eight bruised (from softball) arms and legs into a straight line. He wouldn’t let me get out of missionary. I couldn’t use a change of position or tempo to change the mood or sensations; I was stuck dealing with the mood that was there. I had to focus. I’ve done everything, but I never did nothing. It was hard. He made me look at him. When I came, I cried.

The Dakota-Proxy
8 July 1998

Jerry broke up with me, so I drove to New York. I met up with Kate and Mistress Dakota at Coney Island High. I first saw Dakota while visiting Kate in the dungeon she works at. She looks like Cindy Crawford except she’s prettier than Cindy Crawford. “Dakota never comes out,” Kate said.
    “I came tonight because I heard you’d be here,” Dakota said, looking at me, and everyone else said stuff, but I couldn’t hear anything — everyone’s voice but Dakota’s was like crinkling papers inside my skull. Then I realized they were talking about oral sex. “I never do a thing for men,” Dakota was saying. “They satisfy me and then I do nothing back. I tell them I don’t have to — I’m too beautiful.” If someone thought that, I’d find it despicable. But to say it, proclaim it . . . that made it ballsy and funny. Her arrogance made her even more glamorous. “After I’m satisfied, I tell them: ‘Clean the apartment. And then pay the rent.’ I don’t lift a finger.” I vowed then that Dakota was going to lift a finger tonight. On me! And when it was her turn for my finger, I’d leave. Just because no one ever does that to her. “Can I buy you a drink?” I said.
    “I don’t drink,” she said.
    So I got her a Coca Cola, and a Jack and Coke for myself. Then I got another, because I was scared.
    “No woman has ever made me come,” I told her, hoping she’d take it as a challenge. A guy at our table made a strange noise and started tapping. “Maybe once one did — I wasn’t sure. No woman has ever made me come where I was sure she made me come.”
    “Well let’s go,” Dakota said, and we went to the bathroom. I closed the door behind us and leaned on it, but still I was half-a-foot taller than her. I took off my heels. “You don’t want to be in stocking feet on this floor,” she warned. “I don’t care about that,” I said, and put my hand on top of her head and pushed her down. Her breasts are fake — double D’s — and I felt them up as she rolled down my skirt and stockings and underwear. They were very firm and big.
    Then she was on her knees, and her face was between my legs, and she was licking and fingering me at the same time. She fingered with one hand, and with the other, she squeezed my ass, pulling my hips into her face. I had one hand tight on the doorknob and the other on her head. She came up for air and looked at me with her chin all wet, and I said, “You are so beautiful.” I bet people don’t tell her that much, because she is so beautiful they must figure she hears it all the time and they want to show they’re different by not telling her. Anyway, she was beautiful. Especially with her face wet and at thigh-level, tilted up. She went back to it, but I was so drunk it was hard to feel anything. “Harder,” I kept saying, and she’d do it harder and then I’d tell her to do it even harder, until she was practically beating me with her fingers and her mouth and her palm. And then I came. I was sure I came this time. When it was over, I realized people were pounding on the bathroom door, yelling about pee. Dakota was looking like a pet waiting to be petted. I remembered my diabolical plan, but in my plan I hadn’t counted on how benevolent I feel post-orgasm. “C’mere,” I said, placing her in my spot against the door. I tugged her pants down to her knees. She didn’t have any underwear on, and was waxed completely bald! Oh, it was too fine! I felt ashamed that I’d only trimmed and baby-powdered. I licked up the whole surface of it and couldn’t feel even the idea of stubble. I stuck my tongue in and it tasted like it looked. No wonder the men were happy just to go down on her.

9 July

Later that night, Jerry’s van pulled up in front of the club. His band played, and then he and I went to a hotel room paid for by a Swedish magazine (I’m in New York to interview Jon Spencer). Jerry was reluctant as usual to have sex with me. “I fooled around with two women a few hours ago,” I confessed. (The second time, this South American lady literally flew across the table at me after Dakota and I finally emerged from the bathroom. She was swearing and wrestling me, forcing her tongue into my mouth and squeezing my boobs. I think maybe she had a crush on Dakota and knew that was impossible, so my body served as a sort of Dakota-proxy.)

    “I wait for you all the time,” I told him, “and then you don’t even want me. I got tired of waiting.”
     “You knew I’d be here in an hour, but you went to the bathroom with her?” he said.
     “The last hour is especially painful,” I explained.
     “Are you going to let yourself be controlled by beauty?” said Jerry, and he put his cigarette out on the hotel wall and then he did it to me in every position all across the single, sagging bed and the ripped-rug floor and after that he broke up with me again. Then we went to Odessa’s and had the best breakfast I’ve ever had: A huge plate of food, a fruit cup, delicious coffee, water and a Screwdriver. Plus the waiter flirts with you and your dining companion till you both have balloons for heads — all for only six dollars! Jerry and I separated: I to do my interview and he to reassemble his scattered band. We met back at Holiday, a basement bar. Kate, Bambi, and Jerry’s band mate Falcon were already there.
    “Hey, Lisa,” Jerry said to me, “how come I want to know everything Kate is saying?” And then he swept me up in a waltz even though there wasn’t even music — just a football game on the TV. He asked me more about Kate. All he does is slip away from me — more when he’s in my arms than any other time. But slipping is what the guy does. When Jerry and I were in the bathroom, Falcon kept knocking on the bathroom door. I was calling him names and stuff, telling him to go away in a saucy manner. Jerry said, “You’re in love with Falcon!” He sounded surprised. I said, “Only as much as you are with Kate.” He didn’t stop what he was doing to my body for even a second. He wouldn’t let me turn the light off. In fact I think how much he’s in love with Kate and I with Falcon is not at all — though they’re fine and desirable people. Jerry’s in love with me, and I with him, like headlights skim a child’s bedroom walls and ceiling at night — all at an angle and unreal.

10 July

Our bathroom behavior got everyone banned from Holiday for life — including Kate and Bambi, and it was one of their favorite hangouts. We stumbled outside and Jerry must’ve snuck down a side street when no one was looking — suddenly he just wasn’t there. The rest of our party adjourned to an outdoor café. I choked on a vitamin pill and it flew out of my mouth and Falcon swooped down on it like his namesake and popped the thing in his own mouth, saliva coating and all. It was shocking and super-sexy. (Unhygienic action is a big part of passion — you can tell the married couples from the just-mets because the just-mets still think spit is something desirable and transcendent.)
     “Where were you?” I asked Jerry two hours later when he decided to show up.
     “I went to go get saved.”
     “By whom? Did you get your palm read?”
     “I went to get peace of mind.”
     “Is this your way of saying you went to buy cigarettes?”
     “Nope.”
     “What did you do?”
     “Um, I talked to people I didn’t know. It was nice. People I know, I can’t get as much out of. I was starting to feel like an envelope with you. Like someone was sealing and delivering me. And, um, I wanted to stop the licker. I wanted to break the seal. I can’t talk like this anymore.”
     Jerry accused me of licking him shut! When here I am trying to do nothing but keep open every door in the whole world.  n°

Excerpted from The Lisa Diaries (Black Books). A few advance reviews:

“Be an armchair voyeur in the house of the sex fiends! Go on a wild ride exploring intimacy and excess with Lisa Carver, one of America’s most introspective ultravixens.”
— Carol Queen, author

“She’s like David Sedaris but a dirty girl. She’s my hero.”
— Jill Soloway, writer/producer, Six Feet Under

“I went on tour with her band Suckdog in September 1998, during which everyone but Lisa had to make at least one trip to the emergency room. A week after the tour was over, Ohio and I were sick in bed, Coz was somewhere in West Virginia in a broken-down van, and when I called Lisa she wasn’t sick or tired at all — she’d just flown back from L.A., where she’d spoken at some conference and kissed an international businessman.”
— Dame Darcy, drawer/actor/doll-maker/author

You can order The Lisa Diaries (with a special free gift*) at www.blackbooks.com/catalog. (Just mention hooksexup.com when you order.) You can also order directly from Lisa Carver — send $19 to PO Box 474, Dover NH 03821. The Lisa Diaries is also available, sans free gift, from Amazon.com here. Otherwise, check with your local bookstore; they may have to special-order it. If so, they can get it at (800) 818-8823, or by fax at (415) 431-0172. Direct phone and fax orders from readers and distributors are accepted as well.

* – Two printers refused to print a nude photo of Lisa and her ex-husband in The Lisa Diaries, claiming it was “obscene.” However, Black Books and Lisa are happy to offer the missing photo to all customers from Hooksexup!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
	Lisa Carver is the author of the books Dancing Queen, Rollerderby, The Lisa Diaries and Drugs Are Nice. She’s written for Hustler, Index, Icon, Feed, Newsday and Playboy, among others. She lives in New Hampshire.