Fucking Daphne (33 page)

I concentrated every minute on being
her,
even though I didn't know what this was all for. Was I being apprenticed, or just turned into a Daphne amplifier? I almost didn't care because I was enjoying all the
attention so much. Maybe I was an heir. I just knew asking too many questions would spoil everything.

We were sitting on her bed, early one morning, and she showed me the autobiography of James Brown. In it, he tells how he was born James Brown but hustled to become JAMES BROWN. At the end, he explains that James Brown is a real person, but JAMES BROWN is made up. JAMES BROWN belongs to everyone.

“That's it, you know,” Daphne said. “That's what it's all about. We're all born with normal capitalization, but our task in life is to create the block-caps versions of ourselves. And most people never even try. Most people stay mostly lowercase their whole lives.”

I asked her if she had succeeded in becoming DAPHNE GOTTLIEB (I made a big uppercase D and G with my fingers). But she said no. At most, she had managed to make the lowercase letters in her name a little bigger. Uppercasing was a time-consuming process. It took years, and only a very few people ever achieved it.

I thought to myself that maybe between the two of us, we could make one DAPHNE GOTTLIEB. But I didn't say it aloud.

She didn't touch me for weeks after she fingered me in front of her friends. I started to wonder if she had just been showing off and wasn't really attracted to me. That would be okay, I guessed. But it made me a little antsy, wondering what I was to her.

And then, once the tattoos were done and the Vaseline bandages came off, she asked me if I wanted to go to a women's sex party. I was like, hell yeah. It happened in an old dot-com office, but they'd added manacles to all the walnut paneling. By the time they scrunched my clothes into a paper bag, leaving me naked except for my boots, I
felt connected to this amazing sex-radical women's community that went back generations before I was born.

Daphne asked me if I'd ever seen a sling before, and at first I thought she meant something medical. The air felt denser than normal air, like a mixture of scents and sounds were gathering around me. Hot, sweet. I felt tallow-headed. The sling turned out to be like a hammock, except it was solid and had loops for holding my legs up and apart.

“I've always wanted to see the look on my own face when someone fists me,” Daphne said. “And now I can.”

She stared into my eyes with a dreadful tenderness. She fingered me, like last time, but then she worked a couple of fingers inside. I noticed some other women standing nearby and watching, and I almost closed my eyes. But I kept them open so the other Daphne could see them. And then she had her whole hand inside me, and I was coming stronger than ever before. Waves and waves. People cheered.

After that, she started fucking me in public every weekend. She flogged me at the Citadel. She cut me at the Screwup party, with sterile instruments that she put in a biohazard box afterward. She play-pierced my boobs at a breast cancer fundraiser. She ass-fucked me with a strap-on at a gay photographer's private gallery in SoMa, surrounded by pictures of leathermen hanging from spiderweb chains.

“Do you want her?” she asked a bald guy with a handlebar mustache who did something with scrap metal. “Don't you think she looks hot like this?” I was bent over the table at the leather-daddy photo studio, while her strap-on rocked in and out of me. My dreads splashed like an oil spill across the tabletop. The bald guy agreed that
yes, I looked hot. “You can borrow her,” my opposite number said. “Wanna?” And that was that. He took me home and licked me, just licked me, his mustache making me twitch and leaving little bumps on my skin. After that, she loaned me out sometimes. If you think you've fucked Daphne, it could have been me instead.

It started to freak me out, being just a function of another Daphne. The only thing I accomplished when I went out alone was to contribute to her ubiquity. People waved to me on the street all the time, and I didn't always know if they were waving at me or at her. Valencia Street was a minefield. Everybody said you couldn't tell the two of us apart, unless you knew her well
and
got in close.

I had an annoying phone conversation with my parents, where they asked me if I was succeeding in “finding myself.” Which was a total cliché, and not at all what I had planned to do with my year off. But after I got off the phone, I did feel a weird twinge of lostness. Like I'd accidentally married and given up my maiden name, and I'd only just noticed because my married name was the same. I decided to take some time off.

Without telling the Prime Gottlieb anything, I took a day off from my bookstore job and walked to Ocean Beach, where the surfers couldn't give a shit about performance art. I watched the waves and ate noodles. I thought about calling Daphne 1.0 to tell her where I was, but fuck that. I sat and drank three espressos, and looked at a cute dog, and read both weekly papers and the neighborhood broadsheet. And watched the waves some more. And counted N Judah trains.

Okay, so I got kind of bored.

Daphne-Alpha hadn't even noticed I was gone. She was trying to build the world's largest banana, out of tapioca and mango skins, in her bathtub. “In the future, all art will be organic.”

Something about the contrast, her dark clothes against the white tub and the bright yellow peels, was so vivid I knew I'd remember it forever. I felt full of affection for her. I was a reflection of her, but she wasn't a reflection of me. She was a whole person, one who'd come up with a whole school of mango art while I was staring at the ocean and thinking about noodles. (Like, did you ever wonder where the word “noodle” comes from? It sounds German. Like “strudel.” But “poodle” is French, right? Or is it?)

So all of a sudden I felt ashamed of having wanted to abandon her, and I wanted to make it up to her. And my mind swerved back to the idea of the two of us making a single DAPHNE GOTTLIEB.

“So hey,” I said. “I noticed you haven't had a show at the Mission Art Hole in, like, a few months. And Stucco McSandblaster does a performance there every other week. We should rattle some cages, hey?”

“Fuck the Mission Art Hole,” Daphne said, not turning away from the mango skins she was stapling together in the bathtub.

“Yeah, I know, they're totally lame. But I just think it would be good exposure to—”

Daphne finally turned her dark, unblinking eyes on me, and I stepped back instinctively—plus, I didn't want tapioca stains on my new shirt. She held my gaze with hers. “Fuck. The. Mission. Art. Hole.” She kept staring me down.

I blinked and stammered that yes, fuck them, fuck them all over and then tell them to fuck the fuck off. Fuck those fuckers, anyway.
But D-Alpha had already turned back to her project, which she was planning on slingshotting at the mayor.

Okay, so she didn't like the Mission Art Hole anymore. That just meant I had to work a little harder to get us more exposure. Success comes from organization, right? While she worked on her giant banana, I got on her computer and created a spreadsheet of every single art space in the city and when, if ever, she'd performed there. And how many times. Then I added columns for Stucco, Dollar-Store Molly, and a few other local performers, so she could compare their gigs with hers. It took me six hours.

Somewhere during that time, D had gotten naked and was trying to wrestle the giant banana into shape. I still had on my black leather pants and wife-beater, so for once I looked more like her than she did. I held the iBook over the edge of the tub so she could look at my awesome spreadsheet, but she turned away and pushed the big banana head between us. I tried explaining a second time what I'd done, but she wouldn't look. She thanked me, but not like she was really grateful. And then she sent me home because she was tired and needed the whole bed to herself.

After that, I didn't see her for a couple of days. And then we hung out again, and she seemed friendly and mellow. She told me all about her friend who had a webcam-performance-art deal, and we went to a Jewish orgy where she turned me into a human dreidel using bondage tape and a vibrator. I spun on my ass, naked, while people sang the “made it out of clay” song. It was pretty intense.

And then I didn't see her again for a few days, because the banana wasn't aerodynamic and she had a grant proposal. I worked extra hours at the bookstore and practiced my gestures. I almost
called her a few times, but I bit my hand. At last, another Friday cranked around and she asked me to a backwards-alphabet party, and that was fun. And then more days apart. She had a date with someone else. She went out of town. She was juggling dogs, and I would just make them nervous. Etc. Etc.

So what was I supposed to do? I started going out on my own more.

At parties, people asked if I was the real Daphne. And I said yes. I mean, I'm not imaginary, am I? The only problem was when they wanted me to do some art piece, and I had to make something up. The first couple times that happened, I just froze. Then I tried getting naked and using canola oil to denounce our reliance on fossil fuels, and that seemed to go well, even though at the time I couldn't remember where canola oil existed in that whole performance-fluid hierarchy.

I started getting into it. I was already doing a kind of performance, being the other Daphne, but now I was performing on top of
that
performance. Why not? More layers! The next time people asked me to do something, I was all ready with a whole poi-spinning/
butoh
/ break dancing commentary on the homogenization of mass culture. And then, just as I reached the handspringing climax, I noticed Daphne #1 standing near the doorway, staring between her feet.

I followed her out into the alley and onto the main street. She stopped at a payphone on a pole. “You did this on purpose,” she said into the receiver. “It's a plan, it's . . . how far does it reach?” She
kicked the phone stump. “Is it the East Bay Confusers? Did they send you? To fuck with me?” I kept trying to say that she had it all wrong and I was just trying to help, and nobody had sent me anywhere except my parents, who'd subsidized my ticket out here. She held the receiver away from her face and stared at it, like a snake she was trying to throttle. “I thought I was creating you, but really, you were creating me. It's all too much; it's fucking poison too much.”

Some time after I gave up begging forgiveness, she stopped talking and just stared at the phone. Then she dropped it, still off the hook, and spun on her heels. She said she needed food.

Back at the taqueria where we had hung out that first time, I sat and watched her do deep-breathing exercises, interspersed with nachos, until she regained her equilibrium. “You're actually not so bad,” she said at last. “For a beginner, anyway. But you do need to find your own art. And, you know, symbols work best when they have a literal meaning besides whatever they symbolize.” Tortilla steam settled all around us, sour and starchy, like it could conduct electricity.

“So you're not mad at me anymore? I mean, I really thought I was helping out. You know, with the uppercasing.” I made a capital D and G with my fingers. “I mean, just imagine if you could be performing in two places at once. Or all the time.”

“Daphne, listen to me.” She put down her burrito and took my face in her hands. Her fingers were probably a little greasy, but I didn't want to ruin the moment. “That James Brown autobiography I showed you. He wrote it in the mid-'80s. Do you know what happened to him after that?”

“He got into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.”

“No! Well, yes. But besides that.”

“He died.”

“Before that.”

“He invented a new dance?”

The wiser of us Daphnes sighed and abandoned my face for her burrito. “Look it up,” she said. “The point is, uppercasing comes with a cost, especially if you're not careful.” She talked some more, about always keeping a window open to your real self, even your bone-deep-boring self. Later, I wished I'd written it all down. But at the time I just thought that if any of this stuff was worth saying, Daphne would have found a way to say it with giant, airborne fruit.