Fucking Daphne (32 page)

I was greedy. I was thinking of all the times I had come home to find him and our girlfriend behind a closed door, strangely silent. Were they talking or fucking? I thought of all the times I heard them whispering next to me in the bed, thinking I was asleep. How she walked with Daphne every night to get cigarettes from the gas station three blocks away, while I stayed home. This was paranoia, and greed, and a desperate attempt to mark my territory or, at the very least, leave a mark.

I was going to take what I wanted. I wasn't going to ask. I lowered my head.

He hadn't been inside me, mouth or otherwise, since winter.

His hands stayed away from me. His hips rose from the bed. The world narrowed to the hollow in my cheek.

I'm not going away,
I said with the motions of my throat.
I can outlast you. I will still be here.

I felt his thighs clench. He touched my hair lightly. “I'm going to come soon,” he said. “You might want to stop.”

I lifted my head, and there was the proof of his desire, cooling on his belly.

Daphne didn't touch me. He didn't go back to sleep. He got up, took a shower, and went into the living room. To join her. No words were said.

It was the last time I touched him.

Daphne sent me a postcard that I burned in the sink.

Daphne stopped calling. I blocked her email address and banned her online ID.

It took someone saying, “I had lunch with your ex-girlfriend last week” for me to realize that yes, Daphne was now my ex-girlfriend. We had graduated to “just friends” without ever noticing.

Daphne moved to Bangalore. She let me keep some of her books.

We had three condoms break in less than two months.

Daphne met her fiancé soon after that night. She fell deeply in love. It was a joy to see. They're working on a loft in the East Bay somewhere, turning it into an art space and dungeon. The photographs on the wall are gorgeous. The place will be a delight.

We tried again, but we never did get kicked out of the party.

I put that couch I'd slept on so many times out on the curb, but nobody took it. No one would touch it. I had to haul it to the dump myself.

Daphne is still out there somewhere. Sometimes she brings me a potted plant. We kiss on the porch, even when I have a cold. “I never get sick,” Daphne says. “I'll be fine.”

I know,
I reply.
I remember.

 

 

M
y name is Daphne Gottlieb. I was born on New Jersey's very last family dairy farm. My dad had a theory about cows in wind tunnels. I got into Rutgers, but I decided to take a year off to stretch my horizons.

All my friends tried to tell me San Francisco was over. Yuppie fucked. Go to Austin or Portland instead. But I had a feeling about San Francisco. Maybe it was those big, eager dog heads with the chef hats. San Franciscans preserve those diner-top statues, and any time you carry one of them down the street, a parade just forms behind you. They close the street. Does Portland have dog heads? Hells no.

I don't know what I expected when I got to the Sucka Free. A coolness test? An initiation? I was all braced for whatever. Unstoppable. Eighteen years, I'd played nice. I'd germinated in Hot Topic and boat shoes, and everybody called me a good kid. I didn't want to do drugs, listen to shitty music, or have unsafe sex, like the rebels at Dearly High, but I rebelled on the inside. I saved up my fuck-you-world until it could do some good.

When I got to S.F., I went to every freak event in the Mission and SoMa neighborhoods. I bit my tongue for ages before I could introduce myself to people. And then people reacted. But not to me, to my name. Eyes far out, mouths open. “No way” and stuff. It turned out there was a big-deal performance artist named after me. Or the other way around. She just wasn't famous in New Jersey. “You mean you didn't know?” one girl said. “Daphne Gottlieb! She wrestled a stop sign and won!”

I knew about performance art. When I was eight, my mom had taken me to see “street theater” in Bergen. Two guys dressed up as cows did the Macarena, except they changed the word “Macarena” to “factory farming.” It wasn't even as entertaining as it sounds. I don't know why my mom thought I needed to see that, but it was part of her pattern: months of tennis and needlework, and then the occasional twitchy attempt to expose me to culture. Mom found all her culture on AOL.

But San Francisco was a whole other scene. One person spent an hour gushing to me about Daphne's “Blogging in Blood” performance, which she did in the window of the Mission Art Hole, facing the street. She had a computer with a big screen, so the passersby could see her blog entries. She typed them on a keyboard with razors sticking out of every key (except the space bar, which just had sharp edges all around). As she typed, she bled. The keys got stickier, and then she was faint from loss of blood. “cant type ne more, OMG swimmin fishies in my eyez why do u all hurt me i need protean bringme a SLIMJIM now now now. its all yr fault, all yr fault, all yr fault, I HATE YOU ALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL.”

By the time I met the other Daphne, I'd been hearing about her for a month. The longer it went, the more nervous and curious I got. One
night I worked up the courage to go to a lesbian club night. Toast, or Crash, or Joint. One neonish spotlight, half a mirror ball. We all danced right next to a sharp-elbowed pool game. I had bruises for days.

And then my namesake came between the strobe and me. She towered over me, with jet-black dreads and tattoos and all. She looked at me. I tried to look back but the light was in my eyes. I shouted my name in her ear. She said she knew who I was.

We went to a taqueria. She bought me some nachos and studied the way I tried to eat without being messy. In normal light, her eyes looked warmer. I'd pictured her being twitchy and neurotic. But she just sat, feet up on another chair, holding a bottle between two fingers like a huge cigarette. Nodding while I told her all about my own personal Daphne Gottlieb Experience so far.

When I'd finished, she nodded some more. Looked at me from every angle, top to bottom. “Interesting,” she said. “Potential.”

And she told me more about the performance-art scene. Like, there's a hierarchy of fluids: applesauce at the bottom, semen at the top. (Blood is up there, but semen wins because it subsumes blood.) She told me about life as a femme, and explained all about the queer scene. And I didn't know sexuality could be so complicated. Are you a vorpal bottom or a lateral domme? Do you use safe words or danger-grams?

And then I mentioned that I had a hard time getting into clubs like the one where I'd met her, because I was under twenty-one and I had no fake ID. Then she reached into her purse and pulled out her driver's license. She handed it to me: “Now you do.”

The sun scared me. It rushed the one big window of Daphne's apartment like it was going to ram us. (The window had teeth made out of empty beauty-product bottles, and velvet lips.) One second, it was the middle of the night and I was telling the local Daphne what passed for my secrets. And then, a second later, I was dawn blind. I hadn't realized we'd stayed up all night. I remembered at some point, around 4:00 AM, Daphne had taken photos of me in my underwear from every angle, “to document the process,” she'd said.

We had bonded so hard, I still felt high all the next day, even with the sleep deprivation. As if I'd found my soul mate along with my namesake. This Daphne didn't look all that different from the goth-punk kids at my school, but she rocked the theatricality in everything. I would have been happy enough to be her audience, but she treated me like a fellow performer. Somehow she didn't realize how lame I was, even after I told her my whole story.

Daphne showed up half an hour late for our meeting a couple days later at the bowling alley-size CD store. But then she made an Entrance. Alligator boots, crocodile corset, elbow-length lizard gloves, all jet-black and faux. I stood there in my polo shirt and peasant skirt, wondering if I was in the wrong music video. Since I was new in town and knew no one, I didn't want to crowd her. I stayed ready to vanish at the slightest hint: A tongue click, whatever, I would be gone. And yet, she seemed excited to have me around.

We shopped all over the Haight, the two Daphnes. She helped me pick out a pair of boots, chunky platforms that lifted me to her height. My eyes could meet hers halfway all of a sudden, and she gave me that smile again, the one that put me on the inside. Her face looked so
normal,
at the center of all the display, and maybe that's
why I felt comfortable. And then I twirled on my high boots and saw all the people in the store, suddenly dwarves to me, scurrying below my eye line. They all looked up at me, as if I could rain fire on them.

Daphne took me out. Presented me to her friends. “Let me introduce you to Daphne Gottlieb!” People thought it was hilarious. Hot butches and steely femmes flirted with me. I didn't know what to do with the attention. Daphne said she'd teach me.

Five in the morning, our fifth or sixth time hanging out, she dyed my mousy hair black. She helped me turn it into dreads. I started practicing her gestures. Saying things like “fucking yes
and
no,” and “hierarchies of teleology, bitch.” I started wearing black clothes with lots of buckles and straps, like her. I wasn't sure if I was an art project or a fashion accessory—or what the difference was between the two.

Soon people could hardly tell us apart. We went to sex raves together. She taught me to circle left while she circled right. Then we could wave hi to all the people and find a spot to hold court where nobody was fucking or sucking. At one party, two rival slam poets' tongue piercings were padlocked together. They were naked. It was awesome.

At another party, Daphne told me to strip and stand with my hands and feet as stretched as possible. “Look at her body,” she said to the group of people in black. “It's pristine. No scars, no ink, nothing. It's not like a blank canvas, because no canvas ever arrives this clean. It's ridiculous to have such an untouched adult body.” She ran her gloves over my breasts, armpits, thighs. I quivered. Daphne fingered me to orgasm while her friends agreed that in fact my body was inscribed by virtue of not being inscribed.

She took me to a tattoo parlor where all the artists were punk music stars. She removed her shirt and mine, so that they could see where the tattoos should go. She pointed out some of the finer details of her tattoos, and the artist, Stigma, nodded. Daphne stayed the whole time, just to make sure Stigma copied her right. It hurt like a bitch, but my other half held my hand and petted my nose.

I went with Daphne when she did her performances. I was a decoy for critics, as well as an assistant. One time she was a “textural DJ.” She took over the Ruby Skye nightclub. She had carpet swatches, fur pieces, and drywall samples, all record-shaped. She put them on the turntables, so that people could come up and feel the smoothness or fluffiness as they went around and around. Some clubbers got pissed because they wanted to dance, but they were missing the point. She was commenting on how people never think about the fact that they're dancing
on
and
within
surfaces, and they
privilege
the sounds over the textures. And what about deaf people? She was proudest of the time she remixed a marble slab with some cow leather. She wore headphones, but they just had a loop of someone saying, “You're the greatest DJ, keep it up, you're rocking the decks,” and so on.

This was the life I didn't even know I was seeking in San Francisco, and now I'd found it. The only trouble was, it was her life. The other Daphne's.