Lidia Yuknavitch - The Chronology of Water

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.

MY SECOND HUSBAND WAS A CHARISMATIC NARCISSISTIC tender hearted frighteningly attractive artistic drunk. With hella 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.

Then I saw a guy who looked equally out of place and very uncomfortable with astonishingly beautiful long black hair and eyelashes. I watched him. He kept looking at the door. And fidgeting like he didn’t fit in the seat. I didn’t hear an orientation thing. After the orientation I sort of sauntered up next to him and without looking at me he said, “I feel like I might get arrested here,” and I replied without looking at him, “Do you think they can tell I’m not wearing underwear,” and we went straight from the orientation meeting to a bar and didn’t stop drinking for 11 years, so you might say I was perfectly primed to cross his path.

This man was gorgeous. I’m mentioning this because women live their lives secretly waiting for their lives to become movies. We act like men are the ones shallow enough to desire an unending stream of beautiful women but really, if a charismatic narcissist beautiful bad boy man actually desires us, seems to choose us, we go to pieces. We suddenly feel like we are finally in that movie rather than a life. Just what we always wanted. To be chosen by the best looking man in the room. Rhett Butler. Even though we are of course smarter and more mature and more together than to ever want that. Or admit it.