Lucky and I rose from our park bench and scuttled across the park, down Octavia to Ivy Street, the alley behind Brass Tacks. We scoped out the dark alley. Although a row of homes abutted Marlena’s with no alcoves to fool around in, the Days Inn across the alley had a line of parking spaces for their vans and there was just enough privacy and space for a quickie. We ducked behind a scraped-up silver Ford van; Lucky leaned against the hotel’s beige siding, unzipped her black jeans, and pulled her cock out. I fell to my knees, opened my mouth, and greedily popped her black cock into my mouth. I starting licking and sucking the head, until Lucky became impatient and shoved her cock down my throat by pushing my head forward, spearing me, her cock touching the back of my throat. She rested, pushing deeper and deeper until I started to gag. Then she drew out slowly, dragging her cock along my tender lips and holding my head stationary. With a growl, Lucky started fucking me fast and hard.
“I’m going to fuck us into this alley. Marlena’s is ours!” And with a deep yip, Lucky came deep in my mouth, her cock straight down my throat. I had drool falling from my mouth to the asphalt and my knees were sore from kneeling on stones and debris.
“We’re going to mark this alley as ours with either my piss on you, or your come on me. Which is it? You choose this time,” she growled.
“Piss on me! Please. Do it!” I begged.
Lucky took off her cock, pulled her jeans down, spread her hairy cunt lips, and let loose with a stream of hot piss aimed at the ground in front of me. My cunt clenched at the sight of the stream shooting from her cunt lips, her cunt swollen and red, and her piss glistening in the moonlight. When she was done pissing, she shook her hips like a dog after getting a bath, drops of piss flying. Some fell on my face and I wondered what Lucky’s piss would taste like. I loved her sweat and would plead with her not to shower so that I could revel in her musky odor. Would her piss taste like sex?
Lucky helped me up. My knees creaked and I wobbled. Getting old was playing havoc on my proclivities, but Lucky understood about the fragilities of age, as they were creeping up on her too. Lucky grabbed me by the front of my black Mr. S hoodie and we kissed in the alley. Then we strolled back through the park, past the sweetly scented jasmine that tumbled over the backyard wall at the intersection of Fell and Octavia, and home to Francy and our warm bed.
The next evening, Lucky and I spread a map of San Francisco out on my tiny Victorian wooden dining table, and I took out my tablet. We decided to make a list of places in the city that we needed to own, to mark. We had a lot of ginger tea and Lucky was rubbing pot salve on her hands.
“The alley next to the Castro Theater! Twin Peaks!” I exclaimed.
“In front of the old Lexington Club. The statue of Ben Franklin at Washington Square Park and the site of the old Black Cat in North Beach. All the apartment buildings in the Mission that have been burned down to create tech condos.”
“The End-Up. Dolores Park! Compton’s Caféteria at Taylor and Turk Street in the Tenderloin. Or at least somewhere on Polk Street!”
“The windmills in Golden Gate Park. The baths at Cliff House. Each apartment where our friends have been evicted and every new condo construction site. The old Barracks bathhouse.”
“The purple Victorian hippie house near Rainbow at 12th and Folsom that they repainted in shades of smoke and toast. The rotunda at the Palace of Fine Arts.”
“We can’t bring anything back, or resurrect the dead, but we can make our mark. It’s a kind of magic, carving our way into the earth, the sidewalks, and the buildings. I know this verges on woo, a kind of California quasi-spiritual ache, but I believe that by making our mark with our piss and come we’ll subtly change things. Tilt the world toward us, one orgasm at a time.” I turned red. “I’m sorry if this sounds wacky.”
Lucky stared at me seriously. “It does sound wacky, but I get it. I get the need.”
We looked at our list, then took a hot-pink highlighter and marked each location on our map of San Francisco. Then we taped the map to the wall and triumphantly pinned a red-flag-topped decorative tack to the alley behind Marlena’s drag bar.
We were moving in a few weeks, but we could continue in our mission to re-own San Francisco during and after the move. For now, we needed to box up our possessions, agree on paint colors, negotiate living arrangements, and move. We would fit sex in. We always did.
The next month was two parts excited to one part frantic. We were both relieved that we were moving into a different place instead of one of us moving into the other’s flat. This way the awkwardness of trying to merge books, art, dishes, and other living ephemera was diluted by the craziness of moving and the shininess of a new apartment.
We had both lived alone for several decades, so this was new territory. I would sometimes wake up at 3:30 a.m., and lie between my cotton sheets next to Lucky’s lightly snoring warm body, shocked at the chances we were taking by moving in together.
Blithe and spontaneous was for nineteen-year-olds. At sixty I fretted about the potentially serious consequences of giving up my rent-controlled apartment. If this didn’t work out, not only would I lose a lover, but also I’d most likely have to move out of San Francisco to an only somewhat less expensive place in the East Bay.
Besides privacy, aesthetics were another issue. Lucky was fifty and I was sixty. Both of us had definite opinions about home decorating that did not always merge. We were both stubborn, but I was hoping that love would encourage compromise.
Lucky liked clean-cut lines, Mid-Century furnishings, and cool colors. Her bathroom was a stark barrage of snowy white towels, a forest jungle of plants, and dove-gray walls. The rest of her furnishings in her large studio apartment were teak Mid-Century antiques, with floor-length, stone-colored, heavy linen curtains over natural matchstick blinds. She ate off deep blue, gray, and warm-sienna-brown Danish chunky stoneware from the mid-1960s called Granit and cooked using cast iron pans, supplemented with dented aluminum starter pots and pans. She collected tasteful German Mid-Century art pottery and owned an enormous hideous vintage shag rug in a geometric op art motif in shades of brown, cream, and ocher. Aside from the plants, a cast iron skillet or two, and the slate-blue linen curtains, I would never have given most of her home decor items a second glance, and I’m sure she would say the same for me with my red antique Persian carpets, moss-green velvet overstuffed armchairs, black-slate-topped Victorian walnut wash stand, and gray-marble-topped Eastlake dresser. I was all about the velvet, textiles, Victorian and Arts and Crafts furniture, reds, and oranges. My main concessions to the present were my gray Nori take stoneware dishes and an immense modern brushed steel and dyed wood armoire that I got during a divorce.
We started refining aesthetics before we moved, as we packed, divvying up some of the rooms according to style, and mixing most rooms like cocktails at 3:00 a.m. The main bathroom stayed as is in all its William Morris Strawberry Thief glory and the library became a mixture of Moderne and Arts and Crafts. The dining room was a paean to Mid-Century cool accented with William Morris lace curtains and a Persian tree of paradise carpet. We kept the magnificent vintage stove and used my oak dining table in the kitchen. My brushed steel and dyed wood armoire went into the parlor, along with Lucky’s marvelous 1878 leather-and-oak library armchair with its open modern lines. We kept my moss-green tufted velvet sofa, but donated my ratty maroon mohair Victorian side chair to charity. We kept Lucky’s collection of German art pottery for display in the dining room, however the op art shag carpet was sold to a trendy hipster boutique in the Mission. We bought a new stylishly dramatic wood four-poster bed and put Lucky’s antique steamer trunk at the foot of it to store sex toys and play gear. Lucky’s 1950s light oak valet was perfect next to the McCoy umbrella stand where I stored canes and riding crops. Fortunately, Lucky’s prints and my artwork worked well together without too many stylistic glitches and accidents.
The library was Lucky’s lair, a butch dyke man cave with overtones of extravagant Downton Abbe
y lavishness meets sleek Danish Modern. The studio was mine, more Bloomsbury meets Paris in the 1930s, meets Persia. We decided to keep all of our books in the library, but like men and women in the mosque, to keep them separated with Lucky’s in two barrister bookshelves, and mine in the other two. We were leery of too much combining too quickly, besides we categorized our book collections differently, and trying to align categorization methods seemed too daunting. We combined our cookbooks in the kitchen though, Lucky’s more carnivorous volumes rubbing elbows with my more vegetarian collection.
We hired painters to cover the dreaded rental-colored cream walls, spreading a montage of paint chips over my dining table during one night of exhausting chromatic decision making. By midnight we’d made our choices. The parlor walls were to be golden ocher, the library a moss green, the dining room a muted peacock blue, the bedroom a rich barn red, the foyer a honey gold, my studio a deep thistle, and the kitchen a fiery mango.
And this is how the days passed, in a flurry of intense domesticity with barely enough time to fuck or sleep. A week before we were to move into the new apartment I realized that once we moved in it would still not be over. There would be a whole other stage of unpacking, hanging pictures, unrolling carpets, unwrapping dishes, and getting acclimated to living with each other and living in a new neighborhood. I wanted to cry in frustration and anticipatory tiredness, but instead we got another cat.
My cat Francy was a Craigslist foundling, so we consulted Craigslist again, but all we found were dogs and bunnies. In frustration, we visited the SPCA on Alabama Street in the Mission one Wednesday evening. Francy was a middle-aged, one-eyed ginger tom with a poet’s soul, all soft and snugly, eager to roll over with his paws in the air and used to being the king of the household. We were trolling for kittens, with the thought being that Francy would find a kitten more innocuous. It was going to be difficult enough moving to a larger apartment, without having Francy duke it out with another adult cat in the process, but we thought the distraction of a rowdy youngster might help her acclimate. The immense facility was practically deserted. In an hour, the only people we ran into were a trio of young, white-habited nuns looking for a good mouser, a Spanish-speaking extended family with twin toddlers looking excitedly for their first puppy, and an adorable bear couple wanting to adopt an older kitty. I felt like the little old man in Millions of Cats. Each cat was more beautiful than the next, but we were not contenders for queer cat daddies. The seal point Siamese was too noisy, the black tuxedo one too aloof, the calico too surly. After an hour, we came upon a wee Maine Coon with an enormous bushy tail, huge upright tufted ears, and a soft round belly. And with a wave of a passel of paperwork and a hundred and twenty-five dollars we were the proud daddies of a four-month-old Maine coon kitten that we named Lulu-Bear.
We were moving in a few days. We were both packed up, the new apartment had been painted, and our wooden bed had been delivered. At the last minute, we’d found a McRoskey mattress set, and we’d finally agreed just to pack all of our dinnerware and sort out what we’d use once we unpacked. We hired Delancey Street Movers, took a deep breath, and moved in together.
Unpacking was fast. I wasn’t the kind of person to prolong the agony of moving in, letting taped-up boxes sit in corners for months. I couldn’t understand people who exclaimed, “I haven’t gotten around to unpacking that yet!” two years after moving. I liked to open boxes on Christmas, and I liked to open boxes in new homes. A childhood of moving every two years prepared me for kamikaze acclimation.
And so we unpacked. Two pressure cookers, towels, box after box of books, duplicates of Scrabble, sex toys, framed art, table lamps. The second night, Lucky unwrapped a box of balls and skeins of yarn, knitting needles, and unfinished socks.
“You knit too! That is so cool. And you can knit socks! I’m so jealous. All I can do is knit in a straight line and all I’ve ever made is scarves. I can’t even purl.”
“I haven’t knitted anything for the past eight months. I’ve been too busy courting you.” Lucky winked.
After a week, we were unpacked and firmly nested. Sofas were in the living room, bookshelves in the library, beds in bedrooms, and teapots in the kitchen. The wool Persian runner had been unfurled down the hallway and I’d already tested it for crawling comfort, having spent most of Tuesday night on my hands and knees naked, following Lucky’s black Dehner boots from one end of the hall to the other and suffering rug burns on my knees in the process. The hallway was twice as long as mine and was made for begging. My nipples were sore and tender from dragging on the rough wool runner. I spent one afternoon naked, meditatively combing the runner fringe while Lucky watched from her leather chair in front of the lit fireplace in the library, briar pipe in hand and wearing a vintage maroon quilted-silk smoking jacket, leather pants, and velvet slippers, Marlene Dietrich keeping us company in the background.
Lastly, we pinned up our map of San Francisco in the library. It looked like a war battle map. We’d added two pins since fucking behind Marlena’s drag bar, in front of the End-Up and another memorably in the alley beside the Castro Theater during a run of the sing along Sound of Music. I will never listen to Julie Andrews singing “My Favorite Things” again without thinking of Lucky on her knees, sucking my cock with enthusiasm, while humming along.
We decided that a luxury condo construction site in the Mission would be our next foray into marking our territory, and spent an afternoon along Mission and Valencia Streets scouting out possible venues before deciding on one at 22nd and Mission. This was the site that started suspicions of mass arson in San Francisco, resulting in protests and investigations. That had not stopped developers from tearing down the destroyed three-story building and starting construction of yet another luxury building for techies, displacing more local brown families. It was the ideal place to make a statement.
By now we were old hands at public-sex activism, with our bag of lube and gloves, all black clothing so we’d blend in at night, and our stealthy superpowers. That is such a lie. Each time we did it, we were equal parts nervous and excited. This time it was a little risky. The spot we picked was policed by navy-blue-uniformed rent-a-cops and there were motion-detector lights, but it was the best spot in this construction site.
We arrived at 22nd and Mission at 11:00 p.m., keeping an eye on the building from across the street. Not many people were out, the new moon was high, and wisps of fog clouded the night sky. When the security guard passed by the corner we had staked out for fucking, we waited a minute, then scurried over to the construction site. In the spirit of derring-do, we decided to go for the full squirt. Lucky was going to fuck me until I came against the site, marking it with my come. We stumbled over piles of dirt as Lucky pushed me against a wood column in a cluttered dark corner, pulled down my jeans, and reached in to fuck me, the fingers of one hand curved around my wet cunt and the other hand holding me around my neck. I was already hot and ready for her, and all it took was a few minutes for me to start to come. My come was dripping down my leg, but we wanted to shower the new building, so Lucky turned me around facing the dirty wood framing. I rested my cheek on the scratchy wood post, smelling the sharp scent of wood and preservatives as Lucky fisted my cunt from behind, grunting quietly into the night. Finally I came with a spurt of salty liquid, sprinkling the site with my orgasm. Lucky unbuttoned her jeans, letting loose with a shower of piss through her pee-and-play packer. We collapsed giggling, then heard the shuffle of someone rounding the corner at a rapid clip. Quickly, I pulled up my pants, not caring whether they got wet, and Lucky buttoned up. We stood nonchalantly on the sidewalk by the site as the guard ran around the corner toward us.
“Get back here. Stop!” the guard shouted as he stumbled up to us carrying a small paper bag and panting. “I heard some kids fooling around. Did you see them?”
“We saw a couple of kids run off that way,” I said and pointed toward 21st.
The uniformed security guard scratched his balding head, clea
rly bemused. He was in his thirties, portly, cheerful, and a little out of breath. He took a bite of a coconut-covered donut from a greasy brown paper bag and grumbled, “Darn kids. Now you two be careful around here. We get vandals and troublemakers. It can be dangerous this late at night and you two gentlemen don’t want to get hurt.”
“Yes, sir.” Lucky said. “We were just walking off a little insomnia and are on our way home now.”
“Have you tried chamomile tea or valerian? The wife uses those and swears by them. Better than walking around the Mission late at night!”
“Thanks for the tip. Maybe we’ll give it a go. Have a good night. Hope you catch those kids.”
We walked up the street a bit, hailed a cab and rode home, thankful that no one would suspect a couple of cute old geezers like ourselves of being rabble-rousers. Once home, we added a red-flag-topped pin to the construction site and pondered our next move while snuggled with Francy and Lulu-Bear in the cushy comfort of our bed.
“What about the Palace of Fine Arts? I’m imagining us in the circular rotunda, with the tall marble Greek columns casting shadows through the smoky fog and moonlight as I suck your cock. We can wear our tap-dancing shoes and glide through the columns like Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire afterward.”
“Better yet, we can do it Greek style against the Greek columns, and I can be Alexander the Great and you can be Hephaestion frolicking through the columns of Persepolis before it burned,” I snickered.
“Of course we’ll be Djuna Barnes and Natalie Barney in front of the old Lexington, reenacting the infamous Paris Temple of Friendship on our hands and knees.”
“Fleet Week is coming up! We can suck cock in Chinatown. Get dressed up in uniform and pretend we’re sailors out for a good time. I’ll unbutton your thirteen-button pants, each button, one at a time, ease your pants off, then get you off in the shadows of a dim doorway. Drunken sailors will pass us by, but we’ll be hidden, busy sucking and fucking.” Lucky flicked my nipple for emphasis.
Behrouz Gets Lucky Page 11