No Church in the Wild

by Paine, Bacchus

  He walked directly up to Jackson and they reached out and hugged one another. When they pulled away, Jackson audibly whispered, “You look great.”

  “Thanks,” Ben replied. In my elevated state it seemed about ten seconds before he pulled his arms away from swaying subtly with Jackson and recognized my presence, reaching out to hug me too.

  “We need more beer,” I said, which was a bit absurd given that we held ten unopened beers, but Ben looked down at the stash we had built on our step and agreed with me.

  “And food,” he said insightfully.

  I can’t be sure whether the silence that overtook me as we walked was a result of the weed or the boisterous conversation the two of them immediately engaged in, which left no room for my input. I had grown accustomed to their seclusions together, though. I pulled out that great modern escape, the smartphone, and began seeking a cohort to ensure that my current companions could continue being enamored of one another without interruption.

  To my delight, Isis had indicated a position just behind the tennis courts on the uphill 18th street side of the park, so I sped my walk and led the boys that way. Sunlight glazed the grass.

  There were so many days between these instants of bliss, where we lay in the sunlight, chatting, looking upon a mass of exultant friends, lost to philosophy and merriment. So many days were only full of the tedium of employment, and consequently full of shit.

  By now, through a barrage of texts, I knew I’d be meeting Aaliyah and Grant, the latter of whom took a bit of goading and some guarantees that attendance would not compromise his sexuality. I promised him a hot straight girl would be there to comfort him after his recent breakup, and left out the bit about how I might cut him if he actually made a move on her.

  Our triumvirate stepped over and around rainbow umbrellas and wide blankets and breasts concealed with no more than body paint, looped around the eternally-lengthening bathroom line, and we waited in the concrete and rubber children’s citadel, devoid of children today, under a minor forest of transplanted tropic pines, for Aaliyah. When she approached she wore a grim façade. We hugged greetings, and I pointed Jackson and Ben toward the tennis courts and tugged her back to discuss.

  “Darling, you look miserable. Are you okay?”

  “I guess. Well no. It’s over.”

  “What’s over?”

  “The stoner girl from Haight Street.”

  “Ah. I hadn’t known it was official.”

  “She claims it never was.”

  “Sorry dude.”

  “I’ll be okay. I think. She was totally captivating, though.”

  “You know, before you know it you’re going to find that you have a girlfriend who’s not crazy and doesn’t abuse you and is prepared to admit that she likes women, even just enough to like you.”

  “I’ll believe that when I see it.”

  “Unfortunately I’m afraid you’re going to see more of the same today, cause we’re about to head for Isis now. But she does have some lez friends in tow.”

  “That’s encouraging at least,” she mumbled.

  “I wish you the best.” And we walked on.

  Over sombreros and speedos, cowboy hats and daisy dukes, exposed abs and codpieces and dancing to no music at all, and there she was.

  By now I expected beauty, and grace, and intelligence, but I will confess I was still struck when she smiled. It felt unusually broad, dimpling, and it highlighted the perfection of her skin. And there was still a pulsing rush whenever she deigned to hug me. Ben got a hug first, of course, and even Jackson got one, but then I had the pleasure of pressing my breasts up against hers and I was unmistakably happy for an instant.

  We introduced Aaliyah to Isis’ roommates, at least two of whom displayed some interest in the whimsical mix of colors Aaliyah always wore, and I was heartened as the grim montage of her face melted away and permitted her flirty countenance to take charge.

  We spread a blanket nearby and sat half-intermixed with her posse, watching the boobs in body paint pass by occasionally and cataloguing the myriad types of hats on the female heads surrounding us. It was difficult to ascertain whether the bright pink or neon blue or sunflower-colored locks and Mohawks were celebratory or routine. Yet the sprawling masses of lesbians carpeting the park’s floor seemed to me the largest collection of dykes in all the world. It was to be expected that the lipsticks, the lipgloss, the butch, the preppy, the hipster, the Rastafarian, the goth, the gangster would all mingle together – they must, to have such a vast number of lesbians in one place. Many of these women were from elsewhere, Pride tourists, as they were. Some blankets filled with Texans, who’d sleep tonight crammed on the couches and floors of the high school friend fortunate enough to grab an apartment in the City. Ladies from southern California certainly coiled in and out of the travelling crowds. But the day brought almost every urban lesbian in the Bay Area right to this park, as well, and it made the place surreal.

  I turned to Jackson. “This is Gay Disneyland.”

  “Indeed,” he replied.

  “Sorry, what about all the nipple rings around us is like Disneyland?” Isis asked.

  “Gay Disneyland, his phrase,” I said, pointing at Jackson. “A world of wonder where suddenly those of us that have walked around feeling misplaced or displaced or uncommon or odd or outlandish look about to find endless seas of people who could but accept us because they’re odd or uncommon or displaced or misplaced or outlandish too, and in at least one of the same ways. The Disneyland feeling is the feeling of suddenly finding yourself in a place where everyone is happy about the same thing you are. Where you can do anything you feel like doing in the comfort of knowing the people around you think it’s just fine.”

  “Ah,” she said.

  “You coined that?” Ben asked Jackson, looking up sheepishly.

  “I suppose I did, though I don’t specifically recall…” He flushed through his tan. “But it’s certainly true. Growing up I couldn’t have imagined a place like this existed.”

  “It may be the only one,” Aaliyah said, “There’s certainly no place like this in Kansas.”

  “Well there are hardly African-Americans in Wyoming,” I said. “Maybe Ibiza?”

  “I hear Portland is pretty good,” Aaliyah said.

  “Maybe parts of Rio or the South of France,” Ben added.

  “Miami,” Jackson said, “and Burning Man.”

  “All those places only have pockets or moments of Gay Disneylands,” Aaliyah pointed out.

  “Well, so do we,” I said. “I mean, it’s not as though there’s a big gay event this weekend in Pacific Heights. Those people are living just as straight as they always do. It’s the Castro, not San Francisco, that’s really Gay Disneyland.”

  I didn’t realize Isis was listening, she had lost us to look over the park introspectively, but she suddenly said, “The difference is that the people in Pacific Heights have no problem looking out the window at that giant pink triangle hanging on Twin Peaks. What makes Disneyland Disneyland is that you don’t have to hide that you feel like a kid when you walk out of the pa—”

  A giant beach ball nearly fell on her head then, and Aaliyah reached out to boost it up so that she could smack it away from us and back toward the festive miscreants who’d sent it. I felt my phone buzz against my leg as I watched it fly. Isis frowned.

  Grant approached, much earlier than I’d expected, and I stood up and jammed my finger in my non-phone ear to better hear, to better guide him to our blanket amongst the oodles of blankets. After pacing around our fortress several times I told him to meet me on a particular set of central stairs.

  It took less than one second after he walked up and gave a quick hug for him to say, “So who’s the straight girl?” I suppressed a grumble.

  “Ben introduced us. She’s a neurological researcher and she lives with a lesbian and two girls of flexible sexuality... You’re seriously like rabid, how long have you even been single?”

  �
��Two weeks or so.”

  “So I suppose you’re just looking to get laid?”

  “Probably.” Well she probably won’t be down for that anyway. But, really, I’d never bothered to ask her that.

  “Well… welcome to the club,” I lied.

  He held up a bottle of Jägermeister. “I brought libations.”

  “Good. But what are we going to drink these libations out of?”

  “I hadn’t though of that.”

  “The bottle, then…” I resigned, and I turned to lead him back uphill toward the group. He’d met Ben while I was still in school, but I had to introduce everyone else. Once I actually paused to observe him, now settled at our location for the foreseeable future, he appeared bewildered.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “this is just a lot of lesbians.”

  “Let’s take a shot of the Jäger.” I was growing picaresque on my joint and the beers before teatime, especially since I now drank this way only on days with, er, Events.

  He obliged.

  I noted across the blanket that Jackson’s hand sat very closely behind Ben’s bottom, and I wondered if either Grant or I had any hope of a similar success today.

  So all my unsatisfied passions churn around silently inside of me, feeding on each other through lack of nourishment, like so many animals in a zoo where the keeper has forgotten to feed them.

  Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin

  Dykes March

  The ladies pinning quilts of blankets to the park’s floor began stirring around 5:45. More stood, and a stream of bodies formed along the central stairway of the park, beginning to flow over the borders of the walkway, trickling toward the base of Dolores and 18th Street where the Dykes on Bikes would begin the procession toward Pink Saturday. Still, the blanket nearest ours held what appeared to be six lesbians, and I got distracted watching one of them leap onto another, pin her down, and then bend her neck to plant a long, hard kiss, her mouth sinking slackly into her partner’s, pulling the length of her body over the other girl’s, dropping her thigh between the benthonic lez’s, and then her ass flexing as she ground herself into her partner and deepened the kiss, triceps tensed to her upper body to hold her in position. A tiny Chinese lady passed with a rolling cart, wide-brimmed hat, and plastic bags wrapping her fingers to request their recyclables, then continued on to the next group.

  Isis’ butcher roommate Deb suggested we rise and grab a spot where we could watch the impromptu Sapphonic parade that would soon chase the Dykes on Bikes up 18th Street. The agreement that met her varied with the state of intoxication of the speaker. Aaliyah, having drunk nothing at all, simply smiled brightly and said, “Sounds great.”

  Ben had taken two swigs of the Jäger and was about four beers in, so he said, “Aaaayooo.”

  Jackson had had two swigs of the Jäger, five or six beers, and half of a joint, and he began singing “hey sista yeah sista soul sista,” quietly, over and over again, dancing slightly.

  “I have to piss first,” I crassed.

  Isis had one shot of Jäger and four beers and immediately responded, “Me too.”

  Grant and I had taken about three shots of the Jäger, and he’d had a six pack himself. His eyelids drooped and he glared lasciviously at Isis, having now made several offhand comments about “being a man” or “not being a pussy” and other similarly masochistic things that he clearly did not think through. When she and I stood to walk toward the bathroom, she glanced at him, his eyes directed at her breasts, and then rolled her own eyes as she turned.

  Once we’d put sufficient air between ourselves and the blankets I said, “He’s nervous about being here. He’s not usually like that.”

  “Wha, you mean a douchebag?”

  “Purdy much. When he’s ‘round new groups he tends to prance around like a peacock. He’s actually a pretty smart guy, very… practically intelligent.”

  “Frankly it’s hard to tell.”

  “I… ah think he may also have some separation anxiety,” I’d gotten drunk enough to bring out the South in my very voice, “he just broke up with a girl he seemed pretty excited about, and anytime I’ve seen him in the last year without her has been with his boyz.”

  “What is he, a gangster?” she asked. We stepped to the back of the long, snaking line.

  “Hardly. He hangs out with this group of guys he’s known since college, though I’d note his bestie of them’s pretty obviously gay.”

  “How so?”

  “How obviously?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hmm, how to explain. It’s in the way that Jackson would take one look at someone and say ‘he’s clearly gay.’ This guy does a lot of punctuating his speech with physical gestures, and he usually touches Grant when he does… shakes his shoulders, barrels into him playfully, that sort of thing. His voice lacks protein in the way lesbian voices possess it. His jeans are tight and finely cut. All those sort of things that mean nothing on their own but when expressed together jus’ fuggin’ scream ‘gay!’”

  “I’m sorry, protein?”

  “Protein.”

  “What is protein in a voice?”

  “Imagine every lesbian you’ve ever known and siphon out the common quality all of their voices possess but ‘straight girls’ voices don’t. That’s protein.”

  She reflected for a moment. “Actually, I do get what you’re saying.”

  “Exactly.”

  While the line snaked our conversation turned to Aaliyah, whom Isis said immediately she liked. “Not in the sexual way, I mean… just she seems like a great person.”

  “She is. She’s one of the most caring people I’ve ever met. A lack of kindness is certainly not her flaw.”

  “You suggest she has one.”

  “Oh, we all have them… many of them, generally. With her as with most of the people I surround myself with the flaw is what we do to ourselves, not some grotesque mole or any particular gluttony or hatefulness or excessive vice.”

  She laughed.

  “Okay, maybe my flaw is excessive vice. Or one of my many flaws. But Aaliyah loves too much, or too easily. It’s classic comic book stuff, a power that becomes a weakness. Her heart is so open and so warm and so loving and accepting that she’s blind to all the flaws in people unless someone throws them in her face. She sees only the best in everyone, and as a result she falls madly in love constantly, often before the person she’s with has. Then she gets her heart broken, over and over again. Or, if she has finally realized someone isn’t right for her, she makes this Herculean effort to get it to work and hates herself when it doesn’t as though she’s done something wrong. I was actually really thrilled to see her just let that crazy Marina chick walk away at Haight Street Fair.”

  “So she loves so much she ends up miserable most of the time? Bugger.”

  “Sort of, but with bursts of abundant happiness in between. But I’m confident that at some point she’ll meet a girl who’s as loving as she is and she’ll be more blissfully happy than any cynic such as myself could ever be.”

  “Happiness is damn elusive.”

  “Funny, I would think someone like you would have happiness served to her on a silver platter by a long line of desperate suitors,” I said, dipping my chin and looking up at her, blinking.

  She blushed just slightly before turning her head away and saying, “Not exactly.”

  Now I couldn’t help but ask the question that had been burning in my mind for almost a month. “What about the guy you were with on Union Street? He was really quite hot.”

  “He was, but he was not terribly smart. He stopped calling after we’d slept together. I think he was distant from the point on our third date – Union Street was our second – when I told him I had a Ph.D. That was literally the first time he’d asked what I did.”

  I looked into her pointedly. “I swear, Isis, one day you’re going to tell me something new about yourself that doesn’t sound like someone is describ
ing me.” I shuffled absentmindedly ahead as the line crawled forward.

  “You have a Ph.D. I don’t know about?”

  “Ha, no, but I have had that experience you just described with what feels like a hundred guys – realistically more like 15 – but it seems like every guy I date either only wants to get laid or gets scared that I want to talk about science or something.”

  “I may be as thwarted in that way as you… it’s hard to find someone who wants to talk about science.”

  “May be? You flatter me. You’re brilliant, I just read what other people wrote and remember a lot of it. Being good at that, like, at school, just happens to be something our society prioritizes, but it doesn’t deserve the priority. I don’t see why book smarts are fundamentally better than physical acumen, or musical talents, or sales skills, none of which I have. Every person is special, and often I’m dating these guys who are special, brilliant, in some way, yet still I find I want more intellectual curiosity than they seem to have. You probably know how people react when you tell them something like ‘I love the symphony.’”

  “I do.”

  “Part of it’s me, I confess. What I really want is someone way smarter than me to impress the shit out of me all the time with their intellect.” I caught her eye, and I became entranced by the ring of grayish-emerald circling lime speckled with lemon, vast, almond pools, eternally curious, and I wondered how in the nether hell nature managed to produce such a thing to sit beneath raven hair.

  She looked back into me, then she reached out and wrapped her fingers around my shoulder and said, “Don’t we all.” She stepped forward with the line. I felt a buzz on my ass and pulled out my phone to discover explicit direction from Aaliyah on where we should return to watch the March. We’d progressed far enough to hear toilets flushing through the doorway ahead when the rumble of motorcycles emerged from the streets below and behind us, signaling the congregation of the Dykes on Bikes at the street corner.