“I’m glad.” Lucky was looking a little dreamy, and I know I was feeling tender.
“It looks like your friend, Henry, had a thing for Art Nouveau. The stained glass, the fireplace mantle, the bathrooms,” I said, as I gestured at the stained glass over the bay windows.
“He did. Art Nouveau had a resurgence in the mid-1970s, and Henry decorated this apartment with a fabulous collection of Art Nouveau furniture that he bought at auctions and estate sales. Henry and I used to drive to estate sales early on Sunday morning, then come back to gloat over our loot while drinking crystal pitchers of mimosas and eating eggs benedict off his good china. His favorite dinnerware was white and cobalt blue, decorated with festoons and garlands with a gold metallic rim. He was a terrific cook. We get to reap the remnants of his enthusiasm and good taste. I know it is frivolous. Do you like it?” Lucky turned to me, looking a little concerned.
“I do like it. It isn’t too fussy for you? I know you like cleaner lines,” I said.
“No. It reminds me of Henry. I like the idea of him still being here, watching over his apartment and us.” Lucky squeezed my hand. “You would have liked Henry. He was a huge slut and would spend days at a time at the baths. His favorite was the Barracks on Hallam near Folsom. He also liked to do cross-stitch. I still have a cross-stitch piece that he made for me based on a Mucha illustration of a swooning woman. Of course, he spiced it up by slipping her gown off her shoulder to expose her erect nipple and added a tiny pink iridescent seed bead at the very tip of her tit.”
I giggled. “You’ll have to hang Henry’s naked lady somewhere in the apartment so she can keep an eye out for us. Hey, do you want to start measuring the rooms and windows? Although this joint is so big that we’ll have a hard time filling it up with furniture!”
“I know. I’d forgotten how huge this apartment actually is. When Henry lived here, it was crammed with ornately carved Art Nouveau benches, cabinets, side tables, and chairs. He had huge elaborately framed mirrors hanging in the living and dining room, and gorgeous stained glass and metal light fixtures. At least the light fixtures and stained glass are still here.” Lucky unzipped her rucksack, got out the metal tape measure, handed me the notebook, and started measuring the room and windows while I jotted down numbers.
We had done the dining room, living room, and were just finishing up on the main bedroom, when we heard the stomping of boots coming up the steps.
“It’s us.” John and Autumn walked up the steps and into the bedroom. “Congratulations on moving in together!”
“And congratulations on your new job,” Lucky replied. “This is Behrouz.”
Autumn was a tall, plump woman with long tangled copper hair, creamy freckled skin, a large gold septum piercing, and round rosy cheeks. Her husband John was short and slender with perfect mahogany-colored skin, short dreads, and a carved silver ring on each finger. They were carrying cloth bags of vegetables. I could see green beet and leek tops poking out of the top of the tote bag. We shook hands, then made idle small talk about the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, the East Coast, and snow. Autumn had been hired to teach in the University of Pennsylvania’s cultural anthropology department. They were both from Texas, and had never experienced a winter with snow. We teased them about snow days, blizzards, six-foot snowdrifts, and stockpiling bread, eggs, and milk.
We measured the remaining rooms, then left to eat our pecan rolls and drink tea in the park. It was just a four-block walk to the park entrance at Lincoln and 9th Street, and a half-block walk on Martin Luther King Drive to the gates of the Arboretum. Although we had walked down 9th to the park entrance many times before, both alone and together, it felt different now that we were moving into the neighborhood. I wondered if I would get to know the friendly middle-aged black man selling Street Sheet newspapers on the corner of 9th and Judah, the way I’d become friends with Dearie, who hung out smoking Kools and drinking cans of Old Milwaukee beer in Patricia’s Green Park in Hayes Valley. The people in line at Arizmendi Bakery, where we bought the pecan rolls, were my new neighbors. Were there many queer folk living in the neighborhood? It was exciting to have so many mysteries and unanswered questions.
We made our way to one of the small meadows past the Mediterranean Garden and near the waterfowl pond, spread out our redplaid blanket on the green lawn, and sat, pouring cups of hot mango black tea and unwrapping our sticky rolls, loose pecans showering onto our laps. Lucky took her boots off, stretching out on the blanket. We sat amidst clover, grass, dandelions, and violets talking about the new apartment. Geese quarreled and strutted nearby, while park-goers strolled down the winding path and over the waterfowl pond’s bridge. Children watched turtles sunning on rocks, while Lucky and I lolled in the cool San Francisco afternoon sun planning our life together.
Lucky wiped her sticky fingers with a damp tea towel and brought out her phone to show me some of the furnishings she’d found. Neither of us had a dining room set, although Lucky had a 1950s kitchenette set. “I thought we could go Mid-Century for the dining room. Teak wood, modern lines. I found this set of six Danish teak Koefoeds Hornslet chairs online. They have black leather seats and tall curved sculptural backrests. I haven’t been able to find a large enough teak table and was thinking of commissioning one. And a teak hutch.”
“I like the warm red tones of the teak. Do you want a long skinny hutch like a sideboard, or a tall one?” I asked, scrolling through images of Mid-Century hutches on my phone. We looked together, finally finding one that we both liked, a tall one in the same finish as the chairs with two glassed-in shelves, three long drawers, and fluted grooving in the two sets of closed shelves.
We already had some curtains, but I wanted to get Arts and Crafts lace curtains for at least one room. I’d found a set of reproduction pictorial lace curtains, featuring a design by the British designer C.F.A. Voysey with stags, swans, birds, streams of water, tall thin trees, and a narrowly scalloped border. They would complement the stained-glass transom in the dining room, and act as a design foil to the Mid-Century furnishings. We planned on using my large antique Persian bird of paradise carpet in the dining room, and picking up the greens and blues of the stained glass with mid-tone peacock-blue walls.
“I’d like to get a new bed too. I like your metal bed frame and I like my 1930s wooden frame, but I’d like a bed just for us. I know it’s corny, but maybe even a four-poster!” I felt vulnerably romantic admitting this craving. I poured the last of the tea into our metal camp cups.
Lucky typed four-poster beds into images, and we scrolled through ornate metal enameled beds, mock Far Eastern rattan beds, faux Medieval wooden beds swathed in brocade fabric, white princess beds, metal beds with posts that were shaped like trees, and stark pencilpost beds. As we scrolled through dozens of four-poster beds, we were starting to feel like Goldilocks. This one was too big, that one was too small, where was the one that was just right? Finally we came to a mahogany Venetian four-poster bed with tapered barley twist posts in a dark ebony finish. It was lower to the floor than my bed, so low that it would be impossible to use the underbed for any serious storage, but the new place had a full-length closet along one wall and closets in the other two rooms, so the lack of underbed storage would not be missed. Besides, Lucky’s antique wood-and-metal steamer toy chest would look perfect at the foot of the bed. Best of all, we both loved it.
“A friend of mine posted this on Facebook while she was on a book tour and staying at Kink.com’s Armory building headquarters in San Francisco. They added fancy decorative metal rings to the sides of their wooden beds in the guest room to be used as bondage tie-down points. We could do that too,” Lucky exclaimed excitedly while eating the last nibble of her sticky pecan roll.
We got up, shook out the blanket, packed up, and took the long way through the Ancient Plant Garden, Australia, Chile, and New Zealand before heading toward the exit gate. We caught the #7 MUNI bus, riding down Haight Street, through the groups of grimy street kids s
trumming their guitars and begging on the corners, the gaggles of German and French tourists taking photos at the intersection of Haight and Ashbury, skinny bearded hipsters coming out of the Haight Street Market with bags of organic strawberries and sushi, and oblivious skaters mowing them all down as they sped along the narrow sidewalk. We got off at Market and Haight Street, then walked five blocks to my place in Hayes Valley.
It was bittersweet opening the door to my apartment, knowing that in a month we’d be opening another door. Francy was waiting for us, urging us into the kitchen to pour out her dinner into her ceramic dish, and meowing her hunger loudly. She wound her way around my ankles as I measured out half a cup of dried cat food, and she started eating greedily once it was in her dish.
“What a sweet hungry baby! Poor staving kitty!” Lucky petted Francy’s ginger head. “Would you like a playmate? Another kitty?” Francy ignored her entreaties.
“I wanted to work on my memoir for a little bit,” I mentioned as I rinsed out the green metal thermos.
“How about I make us a broccolini and potato frittata? I can use up the tiny waxy fingerlings that I bought last week, and I have a bunch of broccolini and plenty of Parmesan from Rainbow.” Lucky nuzzled my neck. “Go write. I’ll stay in the kitchen and rustle up dinner.”
I meandered down the hall, opened my laptop, and started working on my memoir. I lived in digs when I was a teenager, and was researching Persian archeological excavation sites, dates, and participants, fact-checking to make sure I got my summers straight. Some summers I’d lived at more than one dig, and it was easy to mix them up. I was deep in research, starting with Hajji Firuz in 1968 and ending with Marv Dascht in 1971, when Lucky appeared with gray pottery plates, silverware, and water glasses, then reappeared carrying an iron skillet containing a hot crusty frittata.
I saved my work and shut down the laptop. “Do we need anything else?”
“Yes, why don’t you bring the pitcher of water and the salad on the kitchen counter?”
I went into the kitchen and returned with a spinach and avocado salad in an olive wood bowl, and a red pottery pitcher of iced water. “Wow! This smells great! Thanks for cooking.” I cut into the frittata, the Parmesan cheese crust crunching beneath my fork to reveal bright yellow-orange eggs cooked with vegetables and even more Parmesan cheese.
“I love these fancy-schmancy pasture-raised Marin eggs we’ve been buying from Rainbow, both the intense taste and the brilliant color.”
“I know, right!” Lucky agreed. “Oh fuck. Have we become hobos? Just a couple of queer bourgeois Bohemians?”
“Probably. We buy eggs that cost ten dollars a dozen and take our Dickies overalls to the cleaners for wash-and fold-service.”
“When we plug in all our electronic gadgets at the same time, they completely cover the coffee table from end to end, iPhones to iPads to Kindles to laptops.”
Lucky and I collapsed in laughter at ourselves. What else was life for, but to enjoy ourselves? For pleasure and love?
I cleared the table, leaving Lucky lolled on the sofa in the parlor catching up with the news online with Al Jazeera, the New York Times, and BBC. As I washed the dishes, I thought about how fortunate we were. We had a refrigerator full of tasty food, all the hot water we could ever want, love for days on end, and we were moving into a gorgeous apartment. I detested smarmy gratitude lists. When folks would break out into affirmations, I cowered. They sounded false and pious to me. I was deeply grateful every day, starting with the feel of my cotton sheets and Lucky’s naked body next to mine, then the luxury of a steaming hot shower with scented soap, then a pot of black tea. I had been poor. I had been homeless. I had been lonely. I had been celibate. Now I was none of those things. I dried the dishes with a striped cotton dishtowel, put them away, and returned to the living room.
Lucky had put on Leonard Cohen and “I’m Your Man” was playing. The lamp was dimmed, and Lucky was sitting in the leopard armchair while smoking her briarwood pipe. Leonard sang sexily, “I’m your man” and we were there for each other.
Lucky held her hand out to me. I dropped to my knees and crawled to her, nestling my head in her lap, her thighs strong and warm beneath my head. Lucky stroked my hair as we listened to the music together, then she tapped out her pipe, stood up, and shoved me into the bedroom gripping my belt. I could feel her warm breath on the back of my neck. My neck felt tender where minutes before she had been stroking it softly.
“I’m your man,” she said as she tore my flannel shirt open, popping the buttons loose, the pearl buttons flying off and landing on the rug. She grabbed the neckline of my T-shirt and pulled me close. “Take off your clothes.”
I pulled my T-shirt over my head, took off my binder, unbuttoned my 501s, took off my socks, and unlaced my boots. Finally I was naked, covered only in bruises, my tender nipples hard, and the silver hairs of my cunt in wet curls. Lucky reached out and twisted my nipples, causing them to harden into points. They were always tender and sore from her daily administrations, and the slightest touch made my cock twitch and swell.
“Oh fuck,” I said, swooning.
Lucky pulled a length of rope out of the bedside table drawer, “Lift your arms.” She bound my breasts in a figure-eight formation, pulling the rope tightly, tight enough to be uncomfortable, and cutting into my flesh, forcing my breasts to swell around the rope. With the chest bondage, my nipples hardened further, aching for her touch. Her face was serious and intent as she knotted rope, one corner of her tongue poking out in concentration.
The lamp cast a warm golden glow over us and we could still hear Leonard Cohen crooning from the adjacent room. Lucky smelled of today’s sweat and Cedarwood Tea cologne, a spicy musty combination that I loved. She fastened leather cuffs on my wrists, pulled my hands behind my back, and linked the cuffs together. I sat on the side of the bed, smelling Lucky and feeling the rope pinch my flesh, getting lost in sensation. My breasts felt so exposed and naked, propped up by the rope tourniquet. Lucky fetched a slender cane from the pottery umbrella stand by the bookshelf, then hefted my breasts with one hand, running her palm over my nipples. She bent over, suckling them, her lips and teeth pulling the tender flesh. I didn’t like having them sucked. It felt invasive and made me feel vulnerable. I tried not to squirm away, but Lucky caught me flinching.
“You’re mine.” She suckled my nipples more intently, watching my face, then released them, grinning at my discomfort.
I gasped as the cool air hit my wet nipples. Then she started caning my breasts lightly, not enough to leave marks, but enough to make me want more. She knocked my thighs apart to cane my inner thighs. Lucky was still dressed, and I was pink and swelling and wet and spinning with desire. Lucky glowed with intent, intent to hurt me, to own me, and to love me. She grinned devilishly. This was love, this electrical sexual connection and power exchange. I can tell you what came next, where orgasms originated, where the cane struck, how I felt when the clamps pressed my tender nipples, the noises Lucky made as she beat and fucked me, however this is merely a litany of actions, noises, and smells. What does this mean as the room fills with the funk of our passion, our moans, my bruises, our bits swelling and wettening? Is that all this is? The meeting of chemicals, pheromones, serotonin, oxytocin, dopamine, and testosterone in Lucky’s and my bodies? Everything changes.
I squirmed. My nipples were still tender from crawling across the rough wool Persian carpet the night before, the chain between my nipple clamps dragging on the red-patterned carpet as I made my way from the slate-topped cabinet to the leopard arm chair where Lucky was waiting for me to give her evening head. My nipples had been tender for over five months. The residue of Lucky’s touch was with me every minute of the day reminding me of us.
Lucky started caning me harder, leaving stripes and welts, my pale flesh reddening and bruising. First my thighs, then my breasts. I hated getting my breasts caned hard. It was different from other places on my body. It was this moment when I thought, “Wh
y do I do this? This hurts and I hate it!” I wanted to stop, and in that minute of resistance and hatred for the pain, my heart spilled, breaking open to Lucky. And at that moment, a cry was forced from me; I opened my mouth to wail and tears spilled from my eyes, wetting my cheeks. Lucky didn’t stop. Why stop, when this is why we started?
I sobbed as my world narrowed to only Lucky and myself in my darkened bedroom. Perhaps that is the key to this existentialist rat’s nest: the answer is the creation of our mutually created cave. Each kiss, each cry, each strike of the cane, each twist of Lucky’s hand inside my cunt, solidified this tiny dreamworld where we existed to pleasure our flesh and our hearts.
When I was in Alcoholics Anonymous decades ago, I was an agnostic. Although we were encouraged to use anything as our higher power, AA had cultural limitations. When I announced in the Selectively Sober meeting that sex was how I prayed, I hit that AA boundary and was subsequently scolded, patronized, and shunned. I was right though, and every twist of Lucky’s hand brought me closer to the state of god.
The caning across my tender swollen breasts burned; I cried, held still, and the burning traveled from my chest to my cock, to my cunt. Swelling, hardening, dripping onto the dark-brown cotton sheets and staining them with my need. I cried, snot running from my nose and over my lips. I licked the sticky mucus indelicately. I might as well have been four and picking boogers. Shamelessly I cleaned the snot from my puffy lips with my tongue until Lucky pulled the black bandana hankie from her back left pocket, held it to my red nose, and sweetly told me to blow. I loved the combination of tenderness and pain that Lucky poured into me, and Lucky loved giving that to me.
Sniffling, I blew, grateful for the tenderness. Lucky shoved me over onto the bed, uncuffed my hands, then brought the ropes up from the four corners of the bed frame to tie me down on my back, legs spread and cunt exposed. Lucky resumed caning my breasts and thighs, switching from one to the other as I held still for her pleasure, crying quietly with every sharp, biting jolt. I could feel my cunt get wetter and wetter.
Behrouz Gets Lucky Page 9