by Holly Lorka
She was older than me, easily in her forties to my twenties. She was attractive and well dressed, and looked like she also believed in being a clean gay. She said hello and introduced herself. I knew immediately that she was going to try to pick me up. I could smell it like I could smell her New West perfume, and I was interested in letting anything improve my situation.
I normally drank beer, but she bought me a Zima. We chatted. When we got to a lull in what would have been normal conversation, she upped the game by lifting an eyebrow to mention how magnificent she was. She owned a business, blah blah … another Zima. She had a nice house downtown, blah blah … another Zima. She drove a fast car, blah blah … another Zima. I was getting quite drunk. Or, more specifically, she was getting me quite drunk on purpose. At some point, perhaps when we heard Wynonna for the second time, I started to feel uncomfortable. The little red warning light that we all have started its dull glow in the back of my head. But it was up in my head, so very far away from my pants, where I desperately wanted to feel the hot buzz of sex with a woman again. So, when she offered to take me in her amazing car to her amazing house, I slurred, “Sure.”
I don’t remember what kind of car she drove, but I bet it was red. I do remember her house. It was mid-century modern, clean. All of its expensive surfaces were very shiny. She poured me a drink, took me by the hand, and led me back into her bedroom.
It was quiet except for the low hum of an enormous saltwater aquarium. I thought she might put some music on, but instead she ushered me directly to her bed. There was immediate kissing, which led to groping and to humping. The red warning light was glowing pretty brightly by now. I wasn’t enjoying myself as much as I thought I would, thanks to twenty-three Zimas, a glass of whiskey, and a complete lapse in judgment. But I forged on, bolstered by the promise of cookies and bluebirds, of camping and poetry and women’s music festivals and all the things that were going to make sleeping with women so much lovelier than sleeping with men.
I took her clothes off and I was lying on top of her, doing all the things I thought I should do, going slowly as I had with Jaime. Minutes in, while I was still navigating her skin with a gentle mouth, before I even moved my hand anywhere near her end zone, she gave me a stern command: “Put two fingers inside of me.” Initially, it stopped me, this command. Though I was a fairly new lesbian and hadn’t gotten that far into the instruction manual yet, I understood that two fingers is a fairly standard move. I’d have gotten there soon enough. I guessed she was just so obviously turned on by my awesome initial moves that she couldn’t wait. So, though there was nothing sweet about how this was happening, I put two fingers into her.
I began to get seriously turned on, because that’s what happens when I find my way into a vagina. I was breathing heavily, sweating, watching her through my dilated pupils, feeling that wonderful heavy, beating warmth in my own pants. I was thoroughly enjoying myself when she spoke again.
“Put three fingers inside of me.”
For the record, two was all I’d ever done. But this woman was older. Maybe when you get older you need three. I put my best three into her and continued like a champ. Though my rookie pitching arm was getting tired, my pants were still on fire with delight. She spoke a third time.
“Put another finger into me,” she commanded.
Um. Wait, now …
Even while drunk I knew that made four and four is too many. Four is a hand. Four is something you have a conversation about first, isn’t it? Four was a chapter I hadn’t expected to find in the manual. Four is when my pants went cold and the red light in my head went on so brightly that it made my scalp burn. I was being commanded, sternly, to do something that made me uncomfortable, something I didn’t really want to do, and something that didn’t seem lovely to me at all. But I scrunched my fingers tightly together and four is what I did, because I agreed to all of this, didn’t I? I let her buy me drinks, I came here in her car, and I got into her bed. Now I had my hand inside of her, and I hoped it would all be over soon because I was getting pretty creeped out. Also, because my arm was about to fall off.
That’s when she said it.
“Put your fist into me.” She wasn’t looking at me when she said it. In fact, I don’t think she looked at me at all that night. It’s like I wasn’t even there. We could have been strangers standing at a bus stop, where I was incidentally shaking hands with her vagina. I was an arm, a hand, a fist that she was commanding, that she somehow earned the right to command. My red light was now setting the room on fire. SAVE ME, GEORGE MICHAEL, it screamed. I wanted to take my hand and run away, to Jaime’s house, to my parents’ house, to kindergarten or somewhere else nice and sweet. But I didn’t run. I was a deer caught in the headlights. A deer that was balling its right hand into the smallest fist imaginable. When I squeezed my five fingers into the stretching, sloppy warmth of her, surprised that they fit, I felt myself leave my body a little bit. I looked at me and what I was doing—reluctantly punching this stranger in the vagina while she wouldn’t even look at me—and realized that the cookies and bluebirds were just some stupid shit I’d made up about sleeping with women. I’d fucked much nicer men than this woman. There may be more of these women out there. I should be more careful, and I should never go home with someone I don’t know, at least not in her car, even if it’s very fast and probably red.
When my arm gave out, when there was nothing more to put inside of her, when she was finished, I pushed myself off and put my shoes on while she got dressed. We walked outside and got into her car. After she started the engine, she looked directly at me and she said one last thing.
She said, “Do you want to go to Whataburger?”
Did I want to go to Whataburger? After that? After she gobbled up every bit of my tender innocence with her hungry vagina? I thought about what had happened that night, about what I’d lost and the knowledge I’d gained. For the second time that night, I slurred, “Sure.” If I couldn’t have cookies, at least I could have a goddamned Whataburger.
isn’t it good
Saturday was the best day. That was the day my dad would mow the lawn, which meant I could help him mow the lawn. By help, I mean I could go get him a beer when he asked for one. By get him a beer, I mean I could open it and drink some of it before I gave it to him. That’s what I mean. Every time I brought him a beer, he’d hold the can up and shake it a little before grinning and saying, “This one feels a little light, Holly.” But this story isn’t about how I started drinking beer when I was seven. This story is about my dad.
Every Saturday afternoon when I was seven or eight or nine, my dad went out and cut the grass. When he was done, he’d wrangle up the three of us kids and plop us down in the family room with our box of toys. He’d put a couple of his prized Beatles tapes in the Zenith dual-cassette stereo system and lie on the couch to take a nap while the Beatles wound from one reel to the next and we played around him.
My house wasn’t safe. It looked fine, but it was full of poisonous snakes, booby traps, and witch hunts. Of crocodiles and surprise pools of quicksand. It was full of my mom, with her anger and harshness and family meetings at two in the morning that would leave us all terrified and skittery. My house was swollen with fear of her.
My mom didn’t want to be a mom. It was clear to all of us that she longed for some other life, one that was much more glamorous. I guess it was difficult accepting her reality as the mother of three young kids living in Nebraska with a man who drove a Buick. When she met my dad, he drove a red Chevy convertible. He liked to dance. He was charming and handsome and swept her off her feet with his fancy jitterbug moves. But that was a long time ago, and by the time I was seven he was a blue-collar machinist with dirty fingernails who drove a sedan and drank canned beer, and together they had us. This was not the stuff her childhood dreams were made of. This was not what she would have chosen for herself. And though it wasn’t on purpose, she punished all of us for it, scolding and yelling and pointing her finger.
She blamed us for how underwhelming her life had turned out.
But on Saturday my mom went to work, and we and our house could finally open our eyes and stop pretending to be invisible. We could breathe, loosen our shoulders, laugh, and maybe even throw toys and socks on the floor. She was gone and we were with my dad.
My dad didn’t say much. When he did speak, he liked to drop silly lines that he’d gleaned from the TV and then crack up at himself. “I may not be good, but I’m slow,” was what he said when he finished putting my new blue banana seat bike together or building us an ice-skating rink in the backyard. “That’s all for now, there’ll be a little more later,” is what he said when he did something good, like swish a basket from the far edge of the driveway while we looked on with our tiny mouths hanging open. He was good-natured, calm and steady. He taught us the important things, like how to skip rocks, how to leg wrestle, how to open a beer. He gave us pocketknives, taught us how to whittle, and didn’t freak out when we cut the shit out of ourselves. He never threatened to leave, never raised his voice, and never pulled us out of bed for a family meeting at two in the morning.
My dad was safe. He was our shark-proof cage, our home plate. He told us we were precious and made us feel as though we were.
Every Saturday my brother and sister and I got to hang out with my dad and feel okay and also listen to the Beatles. Every Saturday was a different mix of tapes, but we heard every album and song so many times that I had all of it memorized: all of the albums, all of the words. I’d always get excited when I heard “Drive My Car,” because I knew that was the first song on Rubber Soul, and up next was “Norwegian Wood.” That weird little song was my favorite.
“I once had a girl. Or should I say, she once had me.” I was seven. Every single time it came on I stopped playing with my Adventure People and tried to absorb what I was hearing—that instrument that sounded like a guitar out of tune, those lyrics that were magical and a puzzle and sexy. Even at seven, I knew that song was sexy.
I listened and pictured John Lennon sitting on a white shag rug trying not to spill wine on it before being remanded to sleep in the bathtub while an obviously beautiful woman who could afford Norwegian furnishings—but no chairs—went off to slumber in her fluffy bed. That is what I saw in my head when that song played. I also could tell John Lennon was very disappointed at having to sleep in the bathtub and there was something intriguing about that, but I couldn’t figure it out. I was seven! I was just barely figuring out beer—I had no idea about trying to get laid.
After his nap, after we’d heard Rubber Soul and Help! and maybe Revolver, my dad would get up and make us frozen pizza. Not only was he safe, but he also didn’t know how to cook for shit because he was the best dad ever. We’d sit there in the family room with our pizza on our little card tables and we’d get to watch The Carol Burnett Show and laugh and spit pepperoni and drink orange soda like it was the most natural thing in the world. Like it might be next door. There was no fear, no hand-wringing. Saturday was easy except for trying to figure out what John Lennon was upset about.
My dad tried to protect us from my mom, but he couldn’t. Lord knows he couldn’t protect himself. He could, however, give us Saturdays, and we wished they would last forever.
I hadn’t thought about those Saturdays in a very long time until a couple weeks ago when I went to dinner with my friend Ann and her two kids, aged three and five. On the way home she put on a mix CD that her ex made for the kids. First up was the Scorpions’ “Rock You Like a Hurricane,” then “Holy Diver” by Ronnie James Dio. I looked at Ann in horror, but the kids knew the lyrics to these songs and sang them in their sweet baby angel voices in the back seat. Then Duran Duran’s “Girls on Film” came on and they knew the words to that one as well. Ann and I did too, because that one was finally a decent song. We were all screaming “GIRLS ON FILM,” dancing in our seat belts and car seats with our hair and arms flying while folks stopped at stoplights wondered what the hell was happening in our car.
When it was over, Ann took that CD out and the kids whined and bitched, but then she pulled Rubber Soul out of the CD holder and put it in. I got excited when I heard “Drive My Car” and immediately fast-forwarded to “Norwegian Wood.” The bitching stopped. I could tell that they, too, were as intrigued as I had been. The kids sat there silently listening to that instrument and those fascinating lyrics, trying to wrap their little brains around it, drawing pictures in their heads and coming up with their own ideas about why John Lennon was upset.
When I heard that song that night, I was immediately seven or eight or nine. I went back to that little bubble that was Saturday afternoon in the family room of my house. There, it still smells like freshly cut grass and pizza, and my dad is lying on the couch snoring gently with his arms crossed over his chest as if to say, “I may not be good, but I’m slow, but who gives a shit anyway, because I’m listening to the Beatles and my kids are safe and memorizing songs about sex and arson.” Me, I’m sitting on the floor, stopped, looking up at the flecks of dust floating in the late afternoon light, wondering why that song makes me feel funny, wondering what it would be like to actually sleep in the bathtub. I feel safe and watched over. By my dad, by this music.
“But Dad, when will you teach me to smoke?”
Photo by: Patricia Lorka
uncle holly
People mistake me for a male all the time. More specifically, they mistake me for a fourteen-year-old boy. All I’m apparently missing is that one thing: a skateboard. Come into a public bathroom with me any day and witness the looks on women’s faces. If they come in while I’m washing my hands, I can watch them in the mirror as they look at me with concern, then go back and check the sign on the door to make sure they’re in the correct one. I assure you, ladies: I can read the sign too.
I’ve been hanging around with a lot of kids lately because they are magical beings and generally don’t give a shit which bathroom I use. They say awesome things at inappropriate times, they dance just because they can’t help themselves, and they squeal. When’s the last time you were so happy you squealed?
Anyway, I was spending time with a friend who has three great kids and she told them, out of respect and manners, to call me “Miss Holly.” Um, that’s the grossest thing I’ve ever heard. Miss Holly sounds so feminine—you can’t do that to a person like me. I thought maybe they should call me “Mr. Holly,” but that felt equally creepy and made me sound like a science teacher. So, I came up with “Uncle Holly.” It’s fun and not creepy, and it doesn’t imply that I wear either lipstick or a tie clip. Uncle Holly it was.
We went to the public pool in the kids’ neighborhood and they started screaming, “Throw me, Uncle Holly,” because kids know what real fun is and also how to give adults an accidental workout. When people around us looked at me, wondering why this young man had on a sports bra and couldn’t throw these kids for shit, it didn’t matter. The kids got it.
Then there was the time a friend came to visit with the kids he’d adopted from Colombia. Excellent kids, these ones. When I met them, I joked to my friend that they, too, should call me Uncle Holly. The kids looked at me, understood completely what was happening, and said, “No. We’ll call you Tío Holly.” Do I need to tell you that Tío means Uncle in Spanish? It was perfect.
The only glitch in the weekend was when the oldest of these kids asked me if I had a boyfriend. I told him that no, I liked girls. Without missing a beat, he asked, “Well, do you have a girlfriend?” When I said no, he asked, “Why not?” Look, kid, Tío Holly is having a period of personal growth, okay? Geez.
This has now taken on a life of its own. Three of my friends are pregnant, and they already refer to me as Uncle Holly. Their babies will too. I’ll teach all of those kids to drink shitty beer, play horseshoes, and throw a softball—that’s what good uncles do.
Photo by: Nevie Owens
fork off
I, like nearly everyone else on the planet, have been through m
y share of difficult breakups. After one of the more spectacular of these breakups, I lost custody of the kitchen table and the spare bed. It was really not that big of a deal in my mind until my parents decided to come visit me for Thanksgiving. Then it became an enormous deal that I had neither a bed for them nor a place to eat. Parents can be pretty needy when it comes to things like sleep and dinner.
I had to think fast. I didn’t have extra money to spend on grown-up things like furniture. I needed it for things like Movies On Demand and wine. (Shhh, I was lonely.) I decided instead to call Rent-A-Center. Yes, they had beds and kitchen tables for rent! See, I’m a genius and a problem solver.
When I called them, they asked for the phone numbers of four references. Really, Rent-A-Center? I own both a house and a car, and nobody made any phone calls to check if I’d be responsible enough to handle those items. With lots of scoffing, I gave them two friends (decent senses of humor), my parents (questionable senses of humor, depending on whether the Bills won that day), and my boss (Canadian sense of humor). I politely asked them not to call either my parents or my boss, because what kind of asshat rents a bed and a table? Of course, they called both my parents and my boss to ask if I could be trusted with a stupid bed and table rental.
I very quickly received phone calls from both my parents and my boss, asking if I was doing okay and did I have any problems I wanted to talk to them about? Like maybe I’d developed a gambling habit or was spending all my money on meth instead of household necessities.
Awesome.
Since I wasn’t addicted to gambling or drugs, I guess my parents figured I was just a loser who not only couldn’t keep a girlfriend but also was struggling in the furniture department, because when they came for Thanksgiving, they brought me a bunch of things they thought I’d need, like dish towels and Christmas plates. Also, forks. They brought me many, many forks. Dad said Mom had hit all the garage sales in town and cleaned them out of all their forks.