Macho Sluts (34 page)

I'm a street person, but I'm not a bag lady or a wino. I am royalty out there, even if this party hack is too dumb to recognize the flora and fauna of the urban wilderness. The women who want to polish my boots and eat my pussy pay highly for the privilege (well, they pay me in cash, anyway). I have no desire whatsoever to take their dirty examination drapes to the laundry, wash off the day's used speculums, dust the desks, and mop their floors. I have lied, bowed, scraped, apologized, and held my tongue under more abuse than I can stand. Now this upright, tight-assed committee commando is going to stamp my application “under consideration” and sit on it and delay my claim at rehab until I get evicted and starve to death. I just can't take it any more.

As soon as I make this decision, self-possession returns. I feel cold and deadly and righteous. I even run my finger around my necklace and haul out my little gold cross, dangle it so she will have to notice, and drop it into my T-shirt. So many of the Wiccan devout really get off on thinking you're a secret Christian. Maybe I am. The moon never talked to me, and neither did Jesus, but is sounds like he understood criminals and poor people. “If you're going to take it to the collective,” I hiss, “surely you ought to have all the information. Don't you want to know what I told her? After she got down on her knees in the alley and started licking my belt buckle? Huh?” I get my hand near my crotch and make a suggestive, masturbatory motion. Her eyes rivet themselves to my hand. She rearranges her big fanny nervously on the chair. “I called her a queer,” I chant, “a cunt-sucking little lezzie, a dyke, a boot-licking slut. And you might also tell your collective that her spit was running down my leg and dripping on the ground until there was a puddle underneath my boots, and she was so excited she pissed herself.”

“Stop!” she shrieks.

“Shit, if your process is worth anything, I think I ought to show up and introduce myself and tell the whole story to everybody.” I grab my crotch and squeeze it. “When's your next meeting?”

We stare at each other, perfectly matched in our hatred. She drops her eyes to go hunting for a rubber stamp. It says “REJECTED,” and she stomps on my application with it and throws the page at me. I catch it as it slaloms through the air.

“You are scum,” she says, trying to sound calm and dispassionate. Her watermelon tits, the kind that look so nice when they are tied up, are thumping on her stomach, she is so upset. “When the bureau sends me leeches like you, I grieve for the decent and valiant women who laid down their lives for the sake of freedom.”

I have no quick answer to that. I know I will probably spend all night trying to think of one, so I spit on the floor. Then I take my time hitching my pants up and settling my belt on my hips. She is tracking the faded patch of denim over my pussy, her mouth open. She starts to whisper, “You foul-mouthed traitor to your sex, wallowing in the garbage and the misery left in our very souls by ten thousand years of male domination.” One of her hands wanders off and finds a heavy crystal paperweight, the only pretty thing in the whole office. I get my ass out of there double-time, never you mind that is has been rimmed a hundred times by the decent and valiant daughters of the revolution.

I run to the elevator and punch the button. There is no response. I shake my head, disgusted and desperate, locate the stairs, and take them at a run. I have my paper, my precious little grubby piece of paper! I can go back to rehab and find out what other torments they have in store for me! I won't starve, I won't be homeless, I won't be free or happy or comfortable … but I have it! The paper!

On the landing, I fold it up and make it safe in my secret jacket pocket. I have some rice and half a head of broccoli there. Or I can walk to the Labrys, my favorite grubby perv bar, run by a refugee Dutch-girl, and get a couple of beers. I haven't eaten since morning. My body hums with deceptive energy, the result of that ugly, but funny, confrontation. I know it won't last, but I decide I would rather come down to a cold glass of beer in a crowded bar than a bowl full of vegetables and soy in my room.

I take the last flight of stairs more slowly, already wearing down. I don't want to think, but my mind gets out of control when I'm tired and hungry. Intricate, inconclusive speculations about the future begin to torture me. I feel much better when I make the street and settle into a transportation walk—long, quick strides, no nonsense and no detours. I'm always jumpy when I'm out in public. I have to keep watching, anticipating, warding off danger by my wit and will. I've only been beaten up once, but it was a bad one.

A mixed gang of boys and girls caught me on my way to the Labrys. I had just finished an exceptionally well-paid scene (my trick had actually taken me up to her ritzy hotel room), and the bar was only a few blocks away. I was feeling jaunty and pleased with myself, so I left the handcuffs on my belt and the chain on my jacket. Big mistake. The kids had a good time with me and my stuff. You'd think all the beatings I've dished out in a professional capacity would be useful in that kind of situation, but they aren't. I came to in an emergency room. A medic was putting my face back together, and he kept bumping into my cuffed wrists. They had been set a notch too tight, and my hands were swelling. I tried to tell him to get them off of me, but my lip was split, and he pretended not to understand what I was saying. Then I got very frightened because I couldn't see my keys on my belt, couldn't feel them in my pocket, and couldn't remember where they had gone.

They made me stay overnight at the hospital in case I had a concussion. I was awakened by the public-safety officer who had brought me in. She had remembered my keys. “You still here?” she said loudly, dropped them on the bed, and left. I was doped up and couldn't string words together quick enough to ask her for help. Besides, the stitches and the swelling in my mouth would have made me unintelligible. I finally did it myself. Luckily, they were English cuffs with a very large, screw-in-key which I could grip between my knees. I would turn the cuffs a notch, get a new grip on the key, and turn again. It took a long time. Once liberated from their grip, I realized it was rather late, and no one had come to check on me or feed me. I got out of bed, dressed, and ransacked the room. The woman on the other side of the curtain was unconscious. She had a whole rack full of medicine. I took it all. Nobody tried to stop me from leaving, even though I staggered down the corridors like a drunk, banging into walls. I even tripped over a mop bucket and overturned it, flooding the floor with grimy water.

When I got home, I sold some of the pills to buy me time off the street so I could heal. I kept a few for a little relief from the pain. A couple of days later, I thought to check my secret pocket. The money from my outcall was still there. It shook me to the bone. They hadn't even wanted to rob me. The rape and the beating were motivated by sheer hatred, not greed.

The streets are nearly empty. Most people are at home, eating dinner with their collectives or their biofamilies. This is a nice part of town. Everybody goes to work while the sun is shining and stays home at night. You'd think they wouldn't be able to resist getting out of doors at some point during the day, but life is apparently too scary outside of four walls. The few people I see are wearing long, loose robes of soft colors, and straw sandals. A group of teenage girls passes, going the other way on the opposite side of the street. “It's a man!” they shout. “Show us your dick, boy!” I force myself to stand up straight and walk past them. They don't throw rocks or turn around and follow me, so I tell myself, ignore it, you're safe. But my mouth tastes like metal.

I wonder what bothers people most—my pants or the leather. The street-fighters of the revolution wore pants, but nobody wants to see it outside the history books. So men used to wear pants, so what? Men used to run the computers and banks and factories, too, but I don't hear the women who control our national economy doing crit-self-crit about that. So the jacket used to be an animal. Everything dies. Would it be better if its hide was just left to rot away? There was a time when practically everybody
ate
meat.

On the farm, they never fed us enough, so we were scavenging for food constantly. The cute boys and girls wound up trading assorted favors for the guards' scraps. The ugly or uncooperative ones would dig in the woods for edible tubers, pick berries, eat leaves, anything. One boy died from eating poisonous mushrooms. Jackie was the only one who could actually hunt. She had somehow figured out how to set snares. I found her emptying her traps early one morning when I was sneaking out to go fishing. After that, we shared what we caught. We were afraid the guards would see smoke from a fire, so we didn't always cook these furtive meals.

If I fuck up again, they'll probably be sending me back to the land for re-education. If I have any spare time, I'll be back in the woods again, looking for protein. The guards will probably expect a reforming prossie to be on the lookout for a protector. Little do they know that not all cats are black in the dark. You make one decision early on in the game. You can either get paid to have them climb all over you, or get paid to beat them up. I prefer the feel of a helpless neck in between my hands to being squashed under somebody else's fantasy. I wonder if I'll still like it when they get through with me.

I chose the Labrys over a quiet night at home, but getting harassed by that gang of girls makes me think about my cubicle a little more fondly. Once I get inside my own front door, I know nobody can bother me, and I keep a piece of pipe by my bed just in case I'm wrong.

My room is part of a complex of state-owned buildings located on the fringe of the bombed-out part of town, appropriately nicknamed Europe. The inmates—uh, residents—are supposed to manage it. This clique of born-agains, real ones, dreary, pretend to do that, but I've never been to any of their meetings, and I throw away the little green notices they slip under my door without reading them. The whole building is full of crazies and fuckups. There isn't much they can do to us. We don't have a lot to lose. Once they turned off the water because people were trashing the fountain in the courtyard. A riot developed. Everybody started throwing all kinds of shit out their windows—newspapers, dishes, vegetable peels, old shoes. One guy pushed his bed out the window. The courtyard is still impassable. The management can't decide who should pay for hauling the piles of junk away. But it was spontaneous, nothing you could count on. Oh, once a bunch of queens over on 4E got together and moved a guy out onto the street. He was stealing stuff, primarily other people's dope. But another time on the floor just under that, somebody brought the wrong person home and got stabbed to death. Nobody went to check on him until the screaming stopped. When they doubled the rents, everybody paid. There's no other place to go, really. Things are the same all over.

I can cook in my room on a gas jet (uncapped illegally). It also provides all the heat since the furnace went ka-blooie. A tap was put into the water main through a hole in the wall by a former tenant who must have been a plumber. I found a Styrofoam box once that must be fifty years old, and I carved a lid for it out of plywood. When I can buy ice, that's my refrigerator. I have hooks on one wall for my wok (one of my few treasures), a sharp knife, a spatula, a large spoon, and a cup. I keep my bowls and chopsticks on top of the cooler. I'm a pretty good scavenger, but I don't bring stuff home if I don't need it. There's no room.

The clinic is located in a middle-class residential neighborhood, the better to serve those suffering from patriarchal effluvia. Looks like tomorrow is garbage-collection day. Better keep an eye out for a tea kettle. I really want one. I think that whistle in the morning would cheer me up more than a hot cup of cha. And paper for the potty is always welcome. I try not to bring books home for that because I don't have enough room to keep them, and I hate to tear them up. I had so many books in my room at school that I couldn't hardly move. I don't want to live like that again. Anyway, I know I never will, which is the same thing, isn't it?

In the projects, there's a large bathroom with showers on every floor. That, along with the communal kitchen, is why they call these “luxury individual living quarters” when they put an add in the paper. My floor is pretty good, there's me, a flock of he-shes, a couple of realmen, a painter, a band that practices infrequently (but for hours at a time), and two would-be junkies who spend most of their time looking for this exotic and scarce drug they're supposedly hooked on or getting sick on substitutes. So when I go to the bathroom, the shower head usually hasn't been ripped off and the drain usually hasn't been clogged up with shit, and I don't find broken glass on the floor or somebody else's works in the sink too often. But people come up from other floors or from outside the building and wait in there to rip you off. It's a problem if I get a jane who wants an enema. The chamber pot isn't big enough to handle that. I usually give them the bag in my room, then escort them down the hall to get rid of it. We talk about putting a lock on the bathroom, but somebody would have to go out and get some keys made, and I know I'm not going to go to all that trouble.

The kitchen, however,
is
locked, so you will never find any derelicts asleep under the tables in there. Part of our rent pays for the kitchen's gas and electricity, but nobody can eat down there unless they've got a chit that says they contributed to the food and did a shift of cleanup. Sorry, I can't stomach sermons or housework. The Christers can have it. My room also has a shallow closet that used to hold a folding bed. I tore that out and sold it. I'll deal with the consequences when I move. I sleep in a homemade mummy bag, stitched together from army blankets and foam rubber that I can roll up and store during the day. Inside the closet there are screw-eyes and ropes, and that's where I do the bondage. But really, most of my tricks don't want to be tied up too much. Maybe a little bit so they can pretend. But they're too scared. A nice jane who panics can do as much damage as an andro. If I was bigger I'd be less worried about being able to handle the ones who flip out, but the really big girls like Black Hawk don't get as much trade. The janes look them over and drool, but they feel safer being alone with me.