Fucking Daphne

by Daphne Gottlieb

  But I’m getting off the subject again. I was trying to find out from Daphne why she told everyone we fucked, and she said that she and Trigger have an open relationship when one or the other is on the road, and she thought you and I had the same thing. Maybe it was all the coke making me paranoid or whatever, but it made me think she knows something I don’t know. Why would she think that, unless you’re getting some on the road and the girls are talking about it?

  And I’m like, “No, Daphne, why did you tell them all that we fucked all day when we didn’t?” And that’s when she’s all, “Who was it, then?” Like I was playing a game with her. She didn’t believe me. She didn’t even believe that I was serious.

  We talked about it. I thought she knew what was up and everything was going to be resolved. I talked to her about relationships and everything. But she had a different take on the situation than I did.

  The next time Trigger called in, Daphne broke up with her. That’s when the shit really started. Trigger must’ve told all the Gretels. I know you don’t think too much about the Gretels, but that’s because you don’t have balls that they could cut off with their switchblades. To you, they’re just butches with matching denim jackets and stripper girlfriends, but to me, they’re a gang with an itchy castration finger. I tell you, every time I hear a rattling dirtbike or a skateboard coming up behind me, I’m scared out of my mind. I don’t know what to do with them. If I fight one, I’m queer-bashing a woman. If I don’t, I’m a eunuch.

  So I hid the only place I knew I could without them or Daphne finding me: Mikey and Xenon’s D&D game. They’ve had a D&D game running continuously for the last three or four years, with people rotating in and out to make runs to buy speed and Mountain Dew, with constant Slayer, Anthrax, and Iron Maiden blasting on the stereo that’s powered by electricity stolen from the neighbors. It’s not that girls aren’t allowed over there; it’s that it’s, well, a fucking D&D game.

  While I was gone, hiding from the world, things got worse, not better. I thought everyone would forget about it, but the stories spun out of control, to the point that Huey Lewis was still in the limo and Daphne and I were putting on a show for him. The Gretels got more and more pissed at me. Dave the painter told me that Trigger put out a fucking contract on me. I don’t think it went that far, but I don’t doubt that she asked the Gretels to kick my ass.

  I hid out at the D&D game for a week. If I had a job right now, I wouldn’t have been able to hide out like that, and the Gretels would’ve totally kicked my ass by now. So you see, it’s a good thing I didn’t get a job like you said I should. Your parents have tons of money anyway. I don’t see why it’s such a big deal to ask them for money. It’s like they’re paying you back for your fucked-up childhood. And it’s cheaper than sending you to grad school, which they thought was better. Sure, I could cut my hair and bathe every day and wear some Gap shit down in the financial district and all that bullshit, but what would that really accomplish in the long run? When am I supposed to do my art?

  When you and the others got back from tour, I thought that you would be able to sort all this out, but that was when you totally lost your shit about this whole thing. So you see it’s not so “simple,” like you said, as that I “fucked Daphne” while you were gone. It’s not a yes-or-no question. Actually, it is. It’s a no, but you wouldn’t take no for an answer without asking me about all this shit I’ve written here.

  I can’t go to the Lower Haight, the Upper Haight, or the Mission anymore. I can’t go to Jones Street or within a block of any of the strip clubs. The Gretels have all those spots staked out.

  By the time you read this, I will be in Seattle. I caught a ride up there being a roadie for Dave’s band. There’s a lot of cool music stuff going on up there with this record label called Sub Pop, and K Records and shit. Don’t come up for a while because I will be crashing at my ex-girlfriend Tura’s place, and that would be awkward. You remember her. I probably told you about her: She was the performance artist who fucked herself onstage with the twelve-inch GI Joes. She’s doing really good now; she’s on methadone and she’s about to graduate from massage school. She’s totally not psycho like she used to be, especially now that she has three months clean, all in a row, which is more than I have, and her boyfriend went back to prison after he violated his parole. Did you know selling one of those fetus-in-a-jar things at a yard sale is a felony? Serves him right for stealing it out of the Butthole Surfers’ tour van. She’s got extra space here now, so I’m going to chill here until everything blows over, and then I’ll be back. So let me know when all this shit calms down. Don’t worry about me and Tura. Nothing will happen, I swear. We’re totally just friends now.

  I’m sorry it all ended like this, but like I said, none of this was my fault. If anyone says anything different, they’re fucking full of shit. I can’t believe I let that crazy cokehead ruin everything. Fucking Daphne.

  DANCING FOR DAPHNE

  Sarah Katherine Lewis

  I was very surprised to see Daphne Gottlieb walk into the Sugar Shack, the club where I work. Which is a strip club, if you have to know.

  The Sugar Shack is on Pacific Coast Highway—the ho stroll made famous by the Green River Killer, who liked to shop for his ladies here—a few miles away from the airport. Sometimes we hear the Boeing jets overhead in between songs, or when the DJ goes out for a smoke and leaves us with dead air and nothing to dance to. The Sugar Shack is a dive, a dirty place where men go to unload themselves. It’s as unlike the glossy strip clubs you see in movies like Showgirls and Striptease as a used condom is to a dozen long-stemmed roses. I’m not proud of my job, but I make decent money and it’s better than working at Butterscotch’s, where you have to hit the men with riding crops and paddles for the same money you get for a regular lingerie show.

  I got sick of pretending to be a dominatrix. Now I’m just a stripper again. It’s easy, and I already have the costumes.

  I hadn’t heard Daphne was in town from the local queer-girl grapevine, which usually buzzed at the arrival of any San Francisco lesbionic superstar. Was it really her? Could it be just another six-foot-tall tattooed dame with dreadlocks, wearing platform boots and holding a lunch box?

  It had to be Daphne. Nobody else looked like her.

  I was hustling one dude pretty hard at the corner table near the stage, trying to get a dance. I’d put way too much time into him already. Even if I got a couple of dances off him, the money wouldn’t be worth the time I’d already spent. Still, the club was dead on a Tuesday night—the death shift—and he hadn’t told me to fuck off yet, so I hung tight and kept smiling and asking him when he was gonna take me back to the VIP so we could get a little nastier. My wig was hot and the doll hair from the bangs kept poking me in the eyes. My bra straps were sawing my shoulders in two, making angry red welts that chafed every time I shifted position, and my too-small thong felt like it was rubbing my asshole raw. I was having a shitty night—I hadn’t made my stage fee yet, and no customers wanted me to dance for them. I felt ugly and fat and smelly, like some sort of livestock, patiently offering my udders to a series of uninterested farmers.

  Daphne stood there at the entrance to the Shack, looking around, appearing nervous but making a good stab at pretending not to be. She had that trick some tall girls have of just standing still and letting the world revolve around them, instead of scampering to find their places in the rotation—a sneaky way of seeming at ease, a model’s trick when you’re almost six feet tall.

  She was alone.

  As I stared at her, she turned her head and looked at me. Recognized me, even though I was wearing my big blond wig and about six layers of sweaty, melting makeup. Smiling, she made her way over to me.

  “’Scuse me a sec,” I said to my customer. I moved away from him rapidly, trying to get to Daphne before she could say anything or use my real name in front of him.

  “Hi, Sar—” she started to say.

  “Holiday,” I said. “It’s
Holiday here.” I cut my eyes back at my customer. Please understand me.

  She reddened. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Holiday. Hello.”

  Daphne Gottlieb.

  Daph-ne Gott-lieb.

  I’m not gonna pull some kind of Lolita shit with this, but I have to admit I have always liked the sound of Daph-ne Gott-lieb and the way it feels in my mouth; the way the emphasis lies sweetly and squarely on the first part of each name like you’re counting time in a polka: one two, one two, one two.

  DAPH-ne. GOTT-lieb.

  And Daphne, for the sweet, batty daffiness of it all, the redhead in Scooby Doo, a name that pretty much signifies a sexy girl or a playful one, or both—and then Gottlieb for the love of God, an arch little caution like a finger in the air. Don’t get too saucy, Miss, the Gottlieb says, even though the Daphne makes you want to take liberties and gives you giggling permission.

  Whoa there, says the Gottlieb. God is watching.

  And you’re caught short with your hands in your pants, feeling led on by one and chastised by the other.

  Between the two of them—the Daphne and the Gottlieb—it’s like a hot girl in a short dress who knows you’re looking at her and likes it, and even bends over the tiniest bit to flash her drawers in your general direction, because she knows that kind of thing (the gleam of panties, the bending) makes you nut-ass crazy for pussy like a big dumb panting boy. But if you try to talk to her, she’ll cut you dead. The panties are the Daphne, but the Gottlieb tells you to back the fuck off. It’s maddening.

  One two, one two.

  So yeah, DAPH-ne. GOTT-lieb. And liebchen for darling, my dear Daphne, my tongue all curled around the word, a secret.

  One last thing I gotta say about Daphne Gottlieb (DAPH-ne. GOTT-lieb).

  Well, she’s a hot bitch, and she knows it. Hot in a weird way, those hazy eyes almost out of focus, like she’s some unearthly creature, or like she’s seeing stuff the rest of us don’t see, or looking above us somehow. Maybe she’s finding metaphors everywhere, plucking them out of the air, consuming them and rolling them around on her palate and thinking them over—considering them. Maybe that’s what poets do, and she’s the kind of big-shot writer who’s just kind of writing all the time, even when she’s just walking around or buying a forty-ouncer at the corner store or hanging out or whatever. Like her body’s on autopilot and her mind is roaming free and crazy in all these special, fancy writerly places normal people can’t get to, and the way she seems so absent—even when she’s present—makes me want to smack her in the face really hard, to get her to really look at me.

  Because I’m real. I’m not some dumb fucking metaphor. I’m real. If I hit her, she’d look me in the face and really see me, I think.

  I know it’s wrong to talk about hitting women. I’m sorry. I think at this point I should probably warn you that I’m a very bad person, a hitter of women—well, I’ve never done that for real, but I think about it all the time. Hitting girls; making them cry.

  And if that’s going to bug you, or if you’re gonna get mad about it, thinking I’m encouraging abuse or whatever, I think it would probably be best if you just skipped the rest of this story.

  I’m sorry. I know it’s bad.

  What you should know about my hometown is this: Seattle is small, and you meet the same people over and over again, in the same places. If you fuck someone, odds are you’re gonna be fucking her ex next week. It’s gross and it makes you want to keep your junk in your pants, because hauling your shit out and trying to fuck someone always turns out to be an exercise in embarrassment when you find out the person you’re backing up against the wall is best friends with your ex-girlfriend and you know they’re gonna be giggling about it the next day. New girls in town always get mad play because they’re fresh meat and they haven’t accumulated the kind of body count you get just by leaving the house, or going on a few dates, or whatever. This town makes me sick like that sometimes.

  And I hear San Francisco—Daphne’s town—is the same.

  If you fuck too many girls in Seattle, you can drop down to S.F. for a while and screw around there, where you’re new goods. And S.F. girlies come up to Seattle for the same reasons—to distance themselves from their own indiscretions and bad decisions; to be fresh and desired and without baggage, no matter how many times they’ve skipped around the block back home. But word gets around if you pull that shit too many times, flipping back and forth and trying to reinvent yourself as someone New and Mysterious each time. Word always gets around, because the one thing girls do is gossip.

  Even girls who fuck each other. Especially those girls.

  So yeah, there’s that BACK IN FIVE MINUTES look in Daphne’s eyes—a sign hung out that makes her head a private space, a members-only club that you’re not invited into—and that’s frustrating.

  And everyone talks talks talks about Daphne’s height, and her long hair, and her tattoos, and they make it sound like she’s some kind of swashbuckling superdyke, like she Strides into the Room with her clumpy hair all flying out behind her, wearing big boots that stomp, and she kind of sucks all the oxygen out of the room because she’s such a bright candle, burning so hard and fierce with the force of her own brilliance and charisma.

  My feeling is that the hotness of Daphne Gottlieb isn’t that she’s tall, or that she’s got some ink on her arms, or her long hair, or anything like that. I think the hotness of Daphne is that she’s hidden. That the real Daphne is underneath—under all the height and the hair and the bigger-than-life San Francisco writer chick persona. The real Daphne isn’t the striding girl in the platform boots.

  The real Daphne is—well, who knows? And that’s where the hotness lives. Because you can put whatever you want into your idea of Daphne Gottlieb, and everyone else is shoving their ideas in there, too, and it ends up that the real Daphne Gottlieb doesn’t even matter anymore because she’s just a glory hole that we’re all fucking—the idea of her; our wishes for what we desire. Her vacancy is something we can all fill up. And the real Daphne’s out-of-body airiness doesn’t contradict or interfere with the DAPH-ne GOTT-lieb we all want.

  My customer was studying us avidly.

  I grabbed Daphne’s arm and pulled her away from his table, toward the gloom of the VIP area, where we could talk without being fodder for a cheapskate jerkoff’s wishful softcore lesbian speculation.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. I know it came out rude, but I couldn’t figure out a better way to say it.

  We’d met only a few times down in San Francisco—through friends, at parties, and once at one of her readings. Seeing Daphne Gottlieb at my work was like some kind of fucked-up mirage—like those dudes crawling through the desert, seeing tall, cool Pepsi machines just on the horizon and practically being able to taste the ice on their tongues. She even shimmered a little in the gloom of the club, wavering in the dust and funk of men’s body smells and the fruity body spray of my coworkers.

  She didn’t belong at the Sugar Shack. And I was suddenly savagely embarrassed by my stripper drag: the push-up bra, the wig, the makeup, the shoes. I felt castrated, like my dick had been chopped off or taped back to my asshole, gaffed into a more perfect version of straight-girl femininity. To tell you the truth, I felt like a fucking jerk.

  Daphne, of course, looked cool and comfortable and Daphneish, with long matted hair all down her back in orange and black Halloween candy-cane stripes and bright red lipstick that clashed with her hair, yet somehow managed to look like exactly the right thing. She wore a short, torn slip dress and giant boots, like any little S.F. riot grrrl ironically appropriating the “underage, but I’ll fuck your shit up” look.

  I realized I was clutching her arm. I unclenched my hand and dropped it to my side.

  “I want a dance,” said Daphne. Her eyes appeared to focus on mine for the briefest of moments before they bounced off again, taking in the sad, unoccupied stage and the tired working ladies lounging near the pop-and-coffee bar.
r />   Fuck me. Was this some kind of San Francisco thing, some kind of girl-on-girl genderfuck statement? Where the trappings of gender performance are utilized by women to appreciate other women in a queer way, like all those ridiculous and boring burlesque performances currently in vogue—where fat girls with shaved heads and bad lesbian tattoos peel off their bras to enthusiastic applause, no matter how gross and saggy their tits are—just because they’re some kind of bullshit reclamation?

  I didn’t want any part of it. I’m not stripping at the Sugar Shack to reclaim shit—it’s because I have rent to pay, and shaking my tits for customers gets me enough money for my bills and—occasionally—the time to scribble my dumb little stories that I never fucking publish, because they all end up being about sex in some embarrassing way.

  Making a statement? With my ass being sliced in half by my nylon thong? I just wanted to make my stage fee.

  I’m not a dancer and I’m sure as fuck not one of those ugly burlesque bitches who think that stripping’s some kind of freedom. I’m a working stiff, a girl on my own doing the best I can, with no college education and no resumé and no experience doing anything other than rolling around onstage and grinding my crotch on men’s legs for money. Most of my friends don’t even know where I work. I was gonna kill the one who told Daphne I was at the Sugar Shack. Fuck! I felt like hiding my face, or running out the door. Not that I could make it very far, tripping down Pac Highway in my stupid plastic see-through stripper shoes.

  Was Daphne making fun of me?

  “You want a dance,” I repeated slowly. “From me?”

  “Yeah,” said Daphne. She looked shy. “I have the money.”