I am my father's son.
... My father's father died when he was a baby. And his favorite sister, Nadya, died a few years later. He told me that at her funeral he lay on the floor and told everybody he was dead, too. But the adults just kept stepping around him. I keep thinking of him lying there on the floor looking up at the long legs of adults walking around him. He doesn't believe in God, has told me that he wishes he could, but faith has been missing in him since childhood.
He was sent off to boarding school, where he says the other boys were very tough. But they left him alone because his teachers respected his intelligence, and he learned to seem calm no matter how he was
feeling. His intelligence and his reserve kept him safe, and he learned never to show loneliness or weakness.
As a young man he came to this country to go to get his Ph.D. in
Economics in Texas. He was an ardent socialist, and he used to tell
me stories about how members of his socialist group would be exiled
for disagreements over a single word or a single point. It reminds
me of my time in lesbian activism.
Because his English wasn't good yet, he says that sometimes he went through books looking for sentences to cut out to put together papers. I think about that whenever I put together a zine.
I am my father's son. I have his reserve, his intelligence, his quickness in reading others emotions. I have his respect and belief in words and ideas. But I am also vulnerable in the way that he could never
afford to be. When I'm a boy, I'm a very delicate one.
I am my mother's daughter.
This weekend my mom helped me move again. She, my new housemate, my brother and I flung around furniture, roped my mattress to the car, and basically built up some muscle strength. My mom's helped me with every move over the last couple years, and there've been lots of them. Not bad for a woman past 50.
Since I was a kid my mom has done all the heavy lifting at my parents' house, mowing the lawn and clipping the hedges while my dad was inside reading a book. I remember her grunts meant to rebuke him whenever she did something especially hard-- this was the work that the men in her family had always done. But if my dad wouldn't do it, then she would, definitely, no matter how much it hurt.
She had her uterus removed a couple of years ago. I never really got the whole story since I was away at college. Apparently her uterus collapsed years ago, from all the heavy lifting she does, and she just ignored the pain for years. I'm not sure what made her finally listen to the doctors and have it out.
I inherited that too. I hurt myself a lot, walk into doors, lift things I shouldn't, ignore pain. Learned not to take painkiller when I was growing up, and not to mention anything hurt unless it was killing
me. The time my father met me in the emergency room after I was punched in the jaw, I wound up comforting and calming him while waiting for an x-ray. That's a particularly horrible thought to me now, me speaking words of comfort through grinding, broken bones. I've tried to chill out since then. You can take macho too far.
Still, when one of my fag friends comes up to me, lifts me and swings me around in greeting, I'll be damned if I'm not going to do the same. I don't care if he is four times my size. I may be small and cute
but I am a tough woman. I'm my mother's daughter, after all.
I am a woman.
It had been a long time since I had a girlfriend. I think of it like a desert, miles of hot sand with the occasional patch of green. That was me, wandering in my celibacy, with these rare and precious one time things.
We had been flirting a lot, this whole do I like her, does she like
me, what are we going to do about it thing. And I had been talking
about how much I wanted to try pouring wax on somebody ever since
that party when those women did it to me. She was interested, and
it seemed like something sexy but safe we could do, cause both knew
we weren't going to be lovers.
So I'm coming home from band practice, taking these long easy curves on the Beltway, thinking about her naked on my bed. Got home and she and Rob had melted the candle in a pot of boiling water, with much joking we made it into the bedroom. I kicked Rob out while she was undressing because he was being too sarcastic.
She has a beautiful body. So many curves and roundnesses. Generous and lush. She lay on her back and let me pet her, run my fingers over her smooth skin. I was telling her how gorgeous she is, how glad I was to touch her.
I started out very gentle with the wax, pouring from high up so that it could cool on the way down, watching it flow onto her and smoothing it with my hands. It was warm, and so was she, and I got caught up in seeing how close I could get the candle to her skin before pouring, watching the way it ran and folded onto her body, the patterns that it made. I hadn't know how she'd like the pain, but she was making these sounds that told me she did, and I was awed by her strength and bravery, by how close she
let me get to her clit.
Fucking is too intimate for a one-time thing. I get lonely afterwards. But I wanted to so bad, and so did she, and I couldn't stop myself. Her warmth and moisture on my fingers. Me pushing her open, that tight sweet place opening for me. Everything going hazy and sharp at the same time, and me just wanting it to go on forever, listening to every word, every sound, and wanting it never to stop.
Afterwards I lay on top of Rob, holding him down with my body while
she hit him with my riding crop. And we got dressed, and went to this
bar, and I got sad because she's not my girlfriend and never will
be.
Next time I melted that candle I discovered how well wax holds scent: it smelled exactly like her.
I am a boy.
... I didn't think he would ever let me touch him because I know that he's straight. I don't understand why he hangs out with me, why he keeps letting me tag along, going to movies with him and his roommates. It's hard to talk when he's in the room.
This one night after the movie all his roommates gradually crashed, leaving me more and more alone with him. I was afraid he'd hear my breathing change, hear my heart. Finally he told me to come upstairs
with him and he showed me some pictures of his family in Puerto Rico, told me stories about them. I didn't sit too close but he put his hand on my leg. I kept looking between the pictures and his jeans, the seams and creases. I knew it was dangerous, but I couldn't stop looking.
"Go on," he said quietly, when he caught me looking. I turned bright red and looked away. Couldn't think of anything to say.
He put his hand on the back of my neck. Left it there for a long time, then started pressing down. I put my head against his jeans and just lay there, getting warmer and warmer.
The whole time I was sucking him I just kept thinking, I can't believe it, I can't believe he's letting me do this. Velvet and hard and salty and sweet and I always thought he was straight. Same way I feel
now, y'know? This is so beautiful I want it to last forever, and at any second I'm afraid that I'll have to stop.