In the auditorium, when she walked out onto the stage, even though I was sitting fairly far from her, I could see that her silver and black hair traveled down the entire length of her back in a braided rope, past her ass. The skin on her face and hands was the color of Albuquerque. When she turned to face our jackastic applause, I saw something. Beginning just underneath the infant thin skin of her left eye was a tiny white gleaming. I had to strain to focus. I had to sit up and lean forward on the edge of my seat.
When they dimmed the lights, only a podium lamp illuminated her face from below. I saw then a web of thin white scars that curved around her cheekbone, cupped her jaw, and continued down her neck into the plunge of her shirt.
I went instantaneously deaf. I mean I didn’t hear one word of her famous hour long photographer talk. It was like being underwater. Occasionally I was able to wrestle my eyes away from her to look at the stream of photos behind her, but not often. My breathing began to go wrong in my lungs. Sweat formed in lines underneath my tits and between my legs. My face got hot. My scalp felt as if it was leaving my head. My mouth filled with spit. I wished everyone in the room dead.
By the time her talk was over and I’d made my way down and through the idiotic academic sycophantic throngs, by the time I penetrated the clone army and reached my hand out to shake hers, to introduce myself, to look at what my body was begging for, I already knew.
She was the same age as my mother.
A few hands before mine I noticed that she wiped her hand off vigorously enough on her pant leg to create the beginning of what would be a stain when she got back to her hotel for the night. A stain on the thigh of her pants from the multitudes of greedy hands. I felt a tinge of shame.
I gripped her hand a little too tightly, as I recall. Desperately thinking inside my skull don’t be desperate don’t be desperate don’t be fucking desperate.
When she looked at me she had that glazed look of a speaker handling the hands and faces of adoring morons. When she let go my hand I thought, that’s that, I’m an adoring moron. Probably I’m drooling.
Her hand in mine was wet. Wet from the effort it takes to speak to a desiring crowd when you are meant to be off gloriously and unapologetically alone in the world with your only beloved: a camera. Point and shoot. Wet with all of our slobbering projections of who we wanted her to be dripping from her hands. Wet with the sweat of hundreds of numskulls just like me.
I don’t know why I did it, I just know I couldn’t not. While I was holding her hand I leaned in close to her face and said my name is Lidia. I am a writer. Which I said exactly to the scar underneath her eye, letting my eyes and voice travel down her skin. I saw stars as I let go. Her hair smelled like rain.
I remember leaving the campus feeling like I was exactly like anyone.
But it would not be the last time I touched her.
I didn’t know yet that desire comes and goes wherever it wants.
I didn’t know yet that sexuality is an entire continent.
I didn’t know yet how many times a person can be born.
Mother.
Before I met her in that auditorium in Eugene, Oregon, I’d been to exactly three SM play parties in Eugene. Wanna know how? Because my former best friend who went on the little beach excursion got me invited. At the SM play parties I saw some awesome things happen. Once I saw a man wrapped in plastic wrap with nothing but his mouth and dick unwrapped. Sometimes he got drops of water in his mouth. Mostly he got his dick whipped until it was red as a screaming infant.
I saw a woman ample as a Michelangelo cherub with her wrists bound and hung above her head get her twat whipped for over an hour while her pussy swelled and reddened and purpled until even the air shuddered and felt faint.
I went back.
I saw a woman’s thighs pierced with tiny blue capped needles - 20 up one thigh and 20 down the other - her eyes streaming with tears, her endorphin rush coming at those around her like a tsunami, her cunt gushing.
I saw reddened welts rise on a woman’s ass like swollen railroad tracks from caning, I saw a tranny pierce her cheek with what looked like a barbeque skewer all the way through to the other cheek without blinking, I saw a man hang from giant meat hooks carefully puncturing his back slabs. I saw bondage in 300 varieties, fistings, bloodsport, dungeons, crossbeams, strange wands shooting out electricity anywhere you wanted.
Some of which I began to let happen to me.
Watching pain and feeling pain mattered on my skin more than anything had since I was a child. Unlike drinking. Unlike drugs. I could feel it. I could more than feel it.
But I wanted to feel it more. Harder.
“ Tell me what you want.”
That’s how it began. If I said something dumb like, I’d like a kiss, she’d say, “No, that’s not right, Angel.” And lightly sting my skin with a riding crop or this crop with thornish things dangling from it in a kind of tassel. “Try again,” she’d say.
I’d try again. And again. Until I said what it was I really wanted.
What I really wanted was to be taken to whatever the edge of self was. To a death cusp. Maybe not literally. But maybe literally.
I suppose it’s good I was in the hands of a professional. A calm sadist. An intellectual. Because she took my request and made it deeper.
“Can you take the pain and go somewhere? Can you make it a journey?”
I don’t know why, but I thought of my mother - who was under hypnosis during my birth. “Dorothy? Do you have pain? Where is the pain?”
At first I didn’t know what she meant by “journey.” I just wanted to be with her. I just wanted her to hurtpleasure me. So when she asked me that, it was annoying. It involved thinking. Can’t we just do it?
This woman though, she was 25 years older than me. For her, having sex - that anchor of heterosexual scripture - she’d left that behind more years ago than my age. So it seems true enough to say that in her hands I became again. I became a daughter again. I became a student again. An athlete. I became a sister again. A lover. And the most difficult: a mother. All the crucibles of my life were now available across the surface of my own body. With her.
This: territories that had caused me psychic pain were now available to recross physically through a pain that … cleansed me like water.
This woman unlike any other woman I ever met in my life didn’t want to be in a relationship. If by “relationship” we mean living together with someone else and entering the social realm as two people you could point to and go look, there’s a couple. Or any of the domesticity that comes with cohabitation or long term close proximity. In fact, my only option for seeing her and being with her and doing with her was to meet her when she came to the west coast or I went to the east. The longing in between? I could feel it in the bruises and cuts and welts left on my skin for weeks. My skin story.
Look I’m not trying to creep you out. Or shock you. I’m trying to be precise. I’m just saying maybe healing looks different on women like me.
She read every story I wrote. Where I placed my truths, just underneath the skin of wild girls - junkies and prostitutes and child thieves and girls with their hair on fire. And that is why the third year she told me to call her “mother.” Because my real mother? She’d been a numb drunk folded into her own pain when I needed her. This one took action. This one could have killed my father. I wanted her to ravage me.
The cross beam was not in a dungeon -those remade basements in the homes of people you would never suspect. It was in broad daylight in her loft, bathed in white and golden light when the sun came in. Or hued black and blue when it rained. The crossbeam was lodged at an angle, not straight up. And there was a padded bench on it like on a weightlifting bench. And a ledge for your feet. When she bound my wrists with thin black leather twine christ-like to the wood I started crying.
“Mother, I would like to be whipped.”
Then she would present a long cat of nine tails - its dark red leather strips the colo
r of blood. “Tell me where you would like to be whipped, Angel.”
So I told her. And begged her. She whipped my breasts. She whipped my stomach. My hipbones. Late into the day. I did not make a sound, though I wept a cleansing. Oh how I cried. The crying of something leaving a body. And then she whipped me red where my shame had been born and where my child had died, and I spread my legs as far as I could to take it. Even my spine ached.
Afterwards she would cradle me in her arms and sing to me. And bathe me in a bubble bath. And dress me in soft cotton. And bring me dinner in bed with wine. Only then would we make love. Then sleep. Ten years to bring a self back. In between seeing her I swam in the U of O pool. I swam in the literature of the English Department. In water and words and bodies.
My safe word was “Belle.”
But I never used it.
My Mother Demonology
IN THE END, THE BOOKS I LOVED THE MOST IN GRADUATE school were the deviant ones. The underbelly of literature. George Bataille and the Marquis de Sade and Dennis Cooper and William Burroughs. Which makes it easier to understand how I found a literary foremother in Kathy Acker.
So if you’ve never read Kathy Acker’s books, then you don’t know how often fathers rape their daughters. Without artifice or affect. Without any literary strategy to lyricise or symbolize or otherwise disguise. A father will show up on a page and rape his daughter, and the daughter will be the one narrating, and she will not be in any kind of victim position you’ve ever imagined. You’ll be reading going, mother of god, that’s some horrific shit, but the daughter won’t be. The daughter narrating the rape by her father will be extremely articulate even if coarse, and the narration will be the jumping off point for radical adventures of a girl child or robot woman or she-pirate. Her rage will drive her. The transgression will write her very body.
When other people I knew in grad school read Kathy Acker’s books they were shocked. Appalled. Particularly most of the budding young feminists. I actually began weeding out women friends by their reactions to her books. The ones that smiled and lowered their eyes with sly understanding and touched themselves, I kept. The ones that freaked out, well, they were idiots. Once I read a paragraph from Empire of the Senseless in my theory of gender class and one of the women began to cry and ran out and barfed. No shit. Pussy, I thought.
When I read Kathy Acker’s books, and particularly any section in which fathers sexually molested or raped or dominated or humiliated or shamed or abused daughters, all I went was yes.
I did not feel shocked. I did not feel appalled. I felt … present.
So it did not take me any time at all to understand that what she was deconstructing was the law of the father. Patriarchy and capitalism. More precisely, the effects of patriarchy and capitalism on the bodies of women and girls. Actually, you know what? I just cracked myself up writing this. If you’ve never read Blood and Guts in High School, you are in for a treat. Every year I teach it I expect to be fired.
You can count the books written by women that precisely articulate these themes on one hand; one hand that has four of its fingers shot off with William Burroughs’ pistol.
But underneath that, what she was also writing was literal. A literal father and a literal daughter and the plainspeak necessary to name it. I’d read sections and stop and look around expecting to get caught or smacked a red blotchy one. You can say this shit? And it can be published?
In this way, her books saved me.
So you can imagine how large it was to meet her and hang out with her. Feminae a feminae.
Many many many people “knew” her better than I. I’m friends with lots of them. That’s actually not the story I’m trying to tell. The story I’m trying to tell is quite a bit more ordinary than that. But sometimes ordinary things are staggering.
I swam with her.
When I swam with Kathy Acker it was at a Best Western shrunken indoor pool with too much chlorine. Trust me. I know chlorine. Her swimsuit was black and blue. Mine was dark red. Her body was decorated with tattoos. Her hair was platinum and as short as a freshly mowed lawn. All kinds of sterling silver sprouted from her face and ears. I had one side of my head close shaven, and on the other side I had Breck Girl long blonde hair. We must have looked like a pretty girl’s wound.
How I came to be swimming with Kathy Acker was I invented a Xine in Eugene - that’s what you to do in Eugene - called two girls review. One day when I was drunk and high with my second husband, sitting on the floor of our next to the tracks rental house I said to him, “Let’s bring Kathy Acker down here to read.” And he looked at me all slow eyed and said, “OK .” Things seemed like they could go like that in Eugene.
It’s not what you think to contact people you think of as mega stars. I dialed information. He called. I wrote down what he should say. He said it. And shebazz. I was swimming in a Best Western pool with Kathy fucking Acker.
I know not all of you would do the tinkle dance to hang out with Kathy Acker. In fact, some of you don’t even know who she was. But to me, Kathy Acker was the shit. She was the woman who staged a break-in on culture and gender, on the prison house of language, and blew it up from the inside out. She was the female William Burroughs.
And after we swam, she talked about pussy spanking.
Pussy spanking, for the uninitiated, is not just foreplay. Christ, most of the women I know now have never had the pleasure, but the good ones have.
When we swam in that ghoulishly green colored Best Western pool, we did laps. This was after she lifted free weights for about an hour. She swam hard. She wasn’t a superb swimmer, but she was a solid swimmer. How she looked in the water was like a human muscle beating the crap out of each lap. And when she’d turn her head to breath, if I happened to breathe her direction at the right time, her face with all that hardware gleamed.
It wasn’t in the pool that the pussy revelations happened. And it wasn’t later in my blue Toyota pickup truck after we went to Rite-Aid to buy her sinus medication, where she asked me things about my body, having seen me swim. Though being asked questions about your body by Kathy Acker is definitely enough to make your car seat wet. It was later, at dinner, with 14 other people sitting around. Between bites of dinner and sips of wine she self narrated about how she didn’t much cum from penetration and loved to be spanked into orgasm. I was sitting next to her. I’ve never been that wet sitting next to someone just talking in my life. I thought I might slide off of the seat and dribble to the floor right there, sucking her ankles and whimpering on my way down, begging her to go under the table with me.
I talked with her other times. People who knew her would agree with me - she was wide open mouthed about traditionally sexual things - she was precise and clear and fully descriptive. It was smaller, ordinary, human things she’d go all quiet or shy or girl about. Like an inside out woman. Like all the swollen red gushing salty complexity of a woman on the outside. Going THIS.
The night after we swam together at the Best Western, after her jammed to the walls packed reading, after the take the writer out to a bar so people can drool on her and crowd her into claustrophobic hell, at approximately 4:23 a.m. I think you know what happened.
I got the motherloving juice spanked out of my pussy until the bed flooded. It was not like with the photographer. I laughed. I laughed with pleasure.
I had a few other encounters with her. We exchanged two letters about sexuality. I talked to her on the phone once when I thought I might be in love with a transsexual person. That’s it. And this. She read my writing and said: “You should keep doing it. Not everyone should. You should.”
Kathy died in 1997 of breast cancer.
Kesey died in 2001 of liver cancer.
Sometimes in my head she is the good mother. He’s the good father. Me swimming in words.
IV. Resuscitations
A Drowning Scene
MY SECOND HUSBAND WAS A CHARISMATIC NARCISSISTIC tender hearted frighteningly attractive artistic drunk. With he
lla black curls of hair traveling halfway down his back. And black eyes. It seemed. And a tiny zipper scar across his left wrist. My break up with Devin - poet, divine one - it took 11 years. Goddamn it.
I took an informal poll of all the incredibly intelligent, intriguing, beautiful women I currently know on the question of why we find ourselves driven like moths to fire toward men who fuck us up. They said things like: “Because in loving his darkness I found my own.” Or “I learned from an early age that if it feels bad, it’s good, and if it feels good, you are bad.” Then there was the ever popular “Between slut and saint I choose slut.” And this one’s a classic of course: “Bad boys are more interesting than good ones. If you can survive it. And I still feel that way.” Also: “Suffering makes a stronger bond than love,” and “I’d rather feel alive and die than feel dead and live.” This one nearly made me cry: “He made me feel like someone somebody would risk something to choose.” But the one I personally identified with the most was, “He celebrated a death drive with me.”
The first night I slept with Devin we consumed 25 bottles of Guinness and two jumbo bottles of wine. I barely remember the actual sex but I remember exactly what we drank. We listened to Jim Morrison all night in his bedroom. Strange Days and LA Woman until it felt like it was in our skin. When I woke up the next morning and looked at the desk across from the bed I saw as many bottles as I was old. I laughed and burped and went back to sleep, Devin’s arm pinning me to the bed.
I didn’t feel anything about myself.
It was everything to be filled with such nothing.
I first met Devin at the orientation meeting for new graduate students at the University of Oregon in Eugene. It was my second year, his first.
I looked around at all the earnest grad student folks at orientation and felt kind of like I had a big red “A” on my chest due to my checkered academic past. Flunked out of undergraduate school in Lubbock. Quit undergraduate school in Eugene. Went back with a pile of D’s and F’s and clawed my way up to the pretty people.