Fucking Daphne (12 page)

 

 

I
was very surprised to see Daphne Gottlieb walk into the Sugar Shack, the club where I work. Which is a strip club, if you have to know.

The Sugar Shack is on Pacific Coast Highway—the ho stroll made famous by the Green River Killer, who liked to shop for his ladies here—a few miles away from the airport. Sometimes we hear the Boeing jets overhead in between songs, or when the DJ goes out for a smoke and leaves us with dead air and nothing to dance to. The Sugar Shack is a dive, a dirty place where men go to unload themselves. It's as unlike the glossy strip clubs you see in movies like
Showgirls
and
Striptease
as a used condom is to a dozen long-stemmed roses. I'm not proud of my job, but I make decent money and it's better than working at Butterscotch's, where you have to hit the men with riding crops and paddles for the same money you get for a regular lingerie show.

I got sick of pretending to be a dominatrix. Now I'm just a stripper again. It's easy, and I already have the costumes.

I hadn't heard Daphne was in town from the local queer-girl grapevine, which usually buzzed at the arrival of any San Francisco lesbionic superstar. Was it really her? Could it be just another six-foot-tall tattooed dame with dreadlocks, wearing platform boots and holding a lunch box?

It had to be Daphne. Nobody else looked like her.

I was hustling one dude pretty hard at the corner table near the stage, trying to get a dance. I'd put way too much time into him already. Even if I got a couple of dances off him, the money wouldn't be worth the time I'd already spent. Still, the club was dead on a Tuesday night—the death shift—and he hadn't told me to fuck off yet, so I hung tight and kept smiling and asking him when he was gonna take me back to the VIP so we could get a little nastier. My wig was hot and the doll hair from the bangs kept poking me in the eyes. My bra straps were sawing my shoulders in two, making angry red welts that chafed every time I shifted position, and my too-small thong felt like it was rubbing my asshole raw. I was having a shitty night—I hadn't made my stage fee yet, and no customers wanted me to dance for them. I felt ugly and fat and smelly, like some sort of livestock, patiently offering my udders to a series of uninterested farmers.

Daphne stood there at the entrance to the Shack, looking around, appearing nervous but making a good stab at pretending not to be. She had that trick some tall girls have of just standing still and letting the world revolve around them, instead of scampering to find their places in the rotation—a sneaky way of seeming at ease, a model's trick when you're almost six feet tall.

She was alone.

As I stared at her, she turned her head and looked at me. Recognized me, even though I was wearing my big blond wig and about six layers of sweaty, melting makeup. Smiling, she made her way over to me.

“'Scuse me a sec,” I said to my customer. I moved away from him rapidly, trying to get to Daphne before she could say anything or use my real name in front of him.

“Hi, Sar—” she started to say.

“Holiday,”
I said. “It's Holiday here.” I cut my eyes back at my customer.
Please understand me.

She reddened. “I'm sorry,” she said. “
Holiday.
Hello.”

Daphne Gottlieb.

I'm not gonna pull some kind of
Lolita
shit with this, but I have to admit I have always liked the sound of
Daph-ne Gott-lieb
and the way it feels in my mouth; the way the emphasis lies sweetly and squarely on the first part of each name like you're counting time in a polka:
one
two,
one
two,
one
two.

And Daphne, for the sweet, batty daffiness of it all, the redhead in
Scooby Doo,
a name that pretty much signifies a sexy girl or a playful one, or both—and then Gottlieb for the love of God, an arch little caution like a finger in the air.
Don't get too saucy, Miss,
the Gottlieb says, even though the Daphne makes you want to take liberties and gives you giggling permission.

Whoa there,
says the Gottlieb
. God is watching.

And you're caught short with your hands in your pants, feeling led on by one and chastised by the other.

Between the two of them—the Daphne and the Gottlieb—it's like a hot girl in a short dress who knows you're looking at her and likes it, and even bends over the tiniest bit to flash her drawers in your general direction, because she knows that kind of thing (the gleam of panties, the bending) makes you nut-ass crazy for pussy like a big dumb panting
boy.
But if you try to talk to her, she'll cut you dead. The panties are the Daphne, but the Gottlieb tells you to back the fuck off. It's maddening.

One
two,
one
two.

So yeah,
DAPH-ne. GOTT-lieb.
And
liebchen
for darling, my dear Daphne, my tongue all curled around the word, a secret.

One last thing I gotta say about Daphne Gottlieb
(DAPH-ne. GOTT-lieb).

Well, she's a hot bitch, and she knows it. Hot in a weird way, those hazy eyes almost out of focus, like she's some unearthly creature, or like she's seeing stuff the rest of us don't see, or looking
above
us somehow. Maybe she's finding metaphors everywhere, plucking them out of the air, consuming them and rolling them around on her palate and thinking them over—
considering
them. Maybe that's what poets do, and she's the kind of big-shot writer who's just kind of
writing all the time,
even when she's just walking around or buying a forty-ouncer at the corner store or hanging out or whatever. Like her body's on autopilot and her mind is roaming free and crazy in all these special, fancy writerly places normal people can't get to, and the way she seems so absent—even when she's present—makes me want to smack her in the face really hard, to get her to really
look
at me.

Because I'm real. I'm not some dumb fucking metaphor. I'm real. If I hit her, she'd look me in the face and really see me, I think.

I know it's wrong to talk about hitting women. I'm sorry. I think at this point I should probably warn you that I'm a very bad person, a hitter of women—well, I've never done that for real, but I think about it all the time. Hitting girls; making them cry.

And if that's going to bug you, or if you're gonna get mad about it, thinking I'm encouraging
abuse
or whatever, I think it would probably be best if you just skipped the rest of this story.

I'm sorry. I know it's bad.

What you should know about my hometown is this: Seattle is
small,
and you meet the same people over and over again, in the same places. If you fuck someone, odds are you're gonna be fucking her ex next week. It's gross and it makes you want to keep your junk in your pants, because hauling your shit out and trying to fuck someone always turns out to be an exercise in embarrassment when you find out the person you're backing up against the wall is best friends with your ex-girlfriend and you know they're gonna be giggling about it the next day. New girls in town always get mad play because they're fresh meat and they haven't accumulated the kind of body count you get just by leaving the house, or going on a few dates, or whatever. This town makes me sick like that sometimes.

And I hear San Francisco—Daphne's town—is the same.

If you fuck too many girls in Seattle, you can drop down to S.F. for a while and screw around there, where you're new goods. And S.F. girlies come up to Seattle for the same reasons—to distance themselves from their own indiscretions and bad decisions; to be fresh and desired and without baggage, no matter how many times they've skipped around the block back home. But word gets around if you pull that shit too many times, flipping back and forth and trying to reinvent yourself as someone New and Mysterious each time. Word always gets around, because the one thing girls do is gossip.

Even girls who fuck each other.
Especially
those girls.

So yeah, there's that BACK IN FIVE MINUTES look in Daphne's eyes—a sign hung out that makes her head a private space, a members-only club that you're not invited into—and that's frustrating.

And everyone talks talks talks about Daphne's height, and her long hair, and her tattoos, and they make it sound like she's some kind of swashbuckling superdyke, like she Strides into the Room with her clumpy hair all flying out behind her, wearing big boots that stomp, and she kind of sucks all the oxygen out of the room because she's such a bright candle, burning so hard and fierce with the force of her own brilliance and charisma.

My feeling is that the hotness of Daphne Gottlieb isn't that she's tall, or that she's got some ink on her arms, or her long hair, or anything like that. I think the hotness of Daphne is that she's
hidden.
That the real Daphne is underneath—under all the height and the
hair and the bigger-than-life San Francisco writer chick persona. The real Daphne isn't the striding girl in the platform boots.

The real Daphne is—well, who knows? And that's where the hotness lives. Because you can put whatever you want into your idea of Daphne Gottlieb, and everyone else is shoving
their
ideas in there, too, and it ends up that the real Daphne Gottlieb doesn't even matter anymore because she's just a glory hole that we're all fucking—the
idea
of her; our wishes for what we desire. Her vacancy is something we can all fill up. And the real Daphne's out-of-body airiness doesn't contradict or interfere with the
DAPH-ne GOTT-lieb
we all want.