Lidia Yuknavitch - Dora - A Headcase

Once I’m in, I’m in . This place is mine. I’ll tell you why later. It’s me against him. The opening moves are important. I turn to look at him. I smile the smile of a girl on the cusp of things. Whaddya got for me today, Siggy. Gimme your best shot.

He stares at me. “I see you’ve … changed … your hair,” is all he’s got. Christ. Child’s play.

I twirl around with great drama. Then I stand extra upright. I whip my hand up to my head and jut my chin out. He looks alarmed. Like I might attack him. Instead, I violently salute him, click my heels together, look slightly above his sad little pad of gray hair, and shout, “Herr Doktor!”

Fuck yeah.

Smoked him speechless.

SOMETIMES HE’S SUCH A CHODE.

I’m serious.

I mean sometimes when I hit playback I just have to roll my eyes and think, what happens to these graying guys? These middle-aged meat sacks? Do their brains atrophy like their ball-sacks do? I mean, they’ve got Viagra for the nuts issue, what do they take for the fucking brain sag? By the way, I’ve taken Viagra, and though it’s true that if you are a girl it will drop your blood pressure to faint on the floor if you aren’t paying attention, it can make your cum job do loop de loops. They don’t like to tell women that. Typical. The shit they’re coming up with for women pales in comparison. Let’s just say no funding’s going down that hole.

Anyway, get a load of this:

“I believe the early disgust you experienced in the first sexual instance, when he tried to kiss you at fourteen, came about as a symptom of repression in the erotogenic oral zone, which, as you yourself related, had been overstimulated in your infancy from thumbsucking.”

Oh, but wait, it gets even better:

“The kiss then stimulated disgust not only because it triggered a moment of sexual excitement — but because the pressure of his erect member probably led to an analogous change in your clitoris — in this embrace, you simultaneously desired and feared the male member, and displaced those emotions orally.”

Did you fucking hear that? Wait. It’s too too good. Lemme play it again.

See?

Pure chode.

I play it and play it. In Marlene’s loft apartment, overlooking Fisherman’s Terminal Dumbasses on ferries in the distance. Tourists hoping someone will throw a fish at them at the market, or sell them coffee and chocolates. I turn the sound all the way up and playback again. The first recording I tried my iPhone, got home and immediately realized I needed an upgrade. It sounded like crap. Now I carry my beloved Zoom H4n — you can capture four-track stereo recording anywhere. Even from inside a Dora the Explorer purse. If you leave enough zipper room to clear its coaxial mic.

To me, no matter what words he is saying, Sig’s voice sounds soft and raspy, except when he wants to sound important. Then he tightens his throat and aims his chin down toward his clavicle shooting for some über smarty guy he must have been in his past. When he does that chin down thing? Kind of he looks like he needs to burp. But with very stern eyebrow action.

Marlene is making bacon. She laughs and laughs — a deep throaty Rwandan one. You heard me. I’ve got that laugh recorded. If you’ve never heard a Rwandan laugh, you are missing something mega-cool.

I say, “I’ve never heard a laugh so deep.”

She says, “It is my dark continent. It lives in my belly!”

Isn’t that cool? I have no idea what the fuck that means, but isn’t it cool?

“What does that even mean?” I ask.

Again the laugh. I record it.

“It is a statement made by history. I had to eat it, and now it is in my belly.” She laughs and I laugh too, my laugh riding hers like a girl on a pony.

“Can you teach me to laugh like that?” She just smiles. All I know about Rwanda is words like genocide and Tutsis and Hutus. Piles of skulls and bones. From TV. That’s why I say her laugh has something in it. Mega.

With her back to me, she says, “Someday, you will learn to laugh with your whole life.”

Bacon sizzles and pops. I can smell pig heating up.

This is where I spend most afternoons and evenings — in Marlene’s loft, reading her shelves and shelves of books from a gazillion years ago — books that drip sex from the annals of history. They are the only books she owns. Like an antique sexuality library. You’d be amazed how much cooler old books are than new ones. Take Havelock Ellis. Sexual Inversion . 1897. Man that Havie was one weird and zany guy. My favorites of his though is Love and Pain: The Sexual Impulse in Women . 1903. Why can’t I find any books like this written by non-dead folks?

Then there’s the collected pamphlets of Abner Kneeland — the last guy to be tried for blasphemy in America. Apparently Mr. Christian got a little loose with his sex talk. Started some weird utopian cult called The Freethinkers society. Right next to that is a buddy of his — Charles Knowlton. The Fruits of Philosophy, or the Private Companion of Young Married People . 1832. This guy was prosecuted a bunch of times. The book was about birth control. Figures. Next to that, the collected speeches of Victoria Woodhull, including “The Scare-crows of Sexual Slavery” (1873). Very Emma Goldman. Of course Emma is up there too, along with photography and art and medical and philosophy books. And all manner of pornology — that’s what Marlene calls it — as long as it was published before 1945. And everything ever written by the Marquis de Sade.

One word for you. Justine .

With her big man hands Marlene makes bacon. With big man calves she struts around the kitchen in a midnight blue silk robe and platinum wig and alligator pumps. She bends and presents me with a plate of bacon, her lips red as a coca cola can, her eyes circled with Kohl, with her Adam’s apple bobbing she says, as deeply and sweetly as the real Marlene, “Won’t you have some Schwein, Liebchen?” Her skin so dark I want to lick it. If I was ever gonna choose a mother, this would be her. Chocolate Madonna.

I fill my mouth with sizzled pig. Possibly my favorite food ever.

Marlene is a manwoman. I first met Marlene at the Wet Spot below Queen Anne Hill. Before it went porno they had wonderful horrible punk band shows. Marlene was at the door taking the benjamins. Since no alcohol was sold or served, we could all get in — buncha whacked out kids with their parents’ pharmaceuticals in their pants and flasks in their underwear. We danced so hard every night we baptized ourselves in bruise. Alongside punkers and bikers and strange angry bald guys — no doubt neo-Nazis or some shit. Marlene was always reading books from inside her little money booth, so one night I went in there and we just really hit it off. She was looking at a book of erotic photos from like before 1900 or something. The Charlotte Baker series by Gustave Rejlander. They were weirdly creepy. I adored her immediately.

She sits across from me and pours herself a scotch. Pours me one as well. I play back once more. This time I catch a bit with my own voice in it:

“Yeah? Well I once saw my father getting sucked off by Mrs. K. They were in his study. The door was ajar. Saw him pop his cork, basically. She had her skirt up over her big, white, adorable ass. How’s that for family romance?”

Then Dr. Sig’s voice goes, “ Yes, your witnessing your father’s desire satisfied orally is of great consequence in your narrative.”

I hear myself go, “Look Doc. It’s not rocket science. It’s a fucking blowjob.”

My stomach twists. I hate the sound of my voice. “I think he thinks I’m a pussy,” I say to Marlene. Stuffing what’s left of my bacon into my mouth.