Lauren Holmes - Barbara the Slut and Other People

• • •

The next morning Chad called and asked if I could work at Making Love instead, and when I got there he told me that Pam was concerned about me working at Desert Hearts. He held his hands up like, What can you do? and started explaining all of the men’s color-coded leather accessories.

The other people working were Marc and Estelle, and they worked the floor while I stayed at the register. Some guys came in and asked for poppers and I looked in the cock ring display case, wondering what might be called poppers. Marc was in the video section, and I didn’t want to ask him what they were, so I just asked him where they were.

“Um, they are NOWHERE,” he yelled back, “because we do not have POPPERS, because they’re ILLEGAL!”

“Oh,” I said, and tried to smile at the guys as they hightailed it out of the store.

Marc told me that poppers were muscle relaxants and he also told me that Pam didn’t want me to work at Desert Hearts because I didn’t look gay.

“That’s discrimination,” I said.

“What are you going to do, call a lawyer?” said Marc.

“Maybe,” I said.

“She didn’t really fire you.”

“True.”

I worked at Making Love all that week and Eunice worked at Desert Hearts until they found a replacement, Carol, who had a crew cut. Marc said if I was really mad he would cut my hair and lend me some cargo shorts. It was clear to me that I needed a rat tail, and later Danny told me he would pay me a hundred dollars to get a mullet, but Marc thought I needed something more subtle, like a faux hawk.

But then on her third day, Carol the real lesbian dropped the entire computer on the floor by accident. Somehow Pam didn’t fire her for that, but Carol never showed up to work again. Marc told me that Pam begged Eunice to come back before she decided I would have to work at Desert Hearts again. I was almost sad to leave Making Love because I liked working with everyone there and I liked gay men — when it came to sex toys, they were much more outgoing than lesbians — but I was glad to be by myself and read all of the books, and the new cash register was so easy. I just typed in the prices, and if something wasn’t marked, I made up a price that I thought sounded fair.

• • •

I asked Chad if he could start sending someone from Making Love to work some of the shifts, like he had originally promised. He did, and I got Sundays off. On those mornings, Danny and I slept in and went and got eggs Benedict and talked about whether we should get a Newfoundland or a mutt. I wanted a little tiny dog that would sit in my lap all the time. I imagined bringing her to the store. I imagined that I owned it and instead of sex toys it sold something else, like maybe cheese, or actually maybe dog toys. Danny wanted a Newfoundland because his family always had Newfoundlands. Those dogs don’t live for very long so his family had had a lot of them, and they were all named Boomer — Boomer the first, Boomer the second, et cetera. Danny could somehow tell them apart, and he choked up at the thought of each one.

• • •

Now that I was back at Desert Hearts, I realized how different the stores were. At Making Love, the boy toys were front and center — butt toys, cock rings, and what I was sure was more lube than even the city of San Francisco could use. The backdrop was leather accessories, bondage accessories, a sex swing, porn, and in one corner, the lesbian and straight stuff, just in case.

At Desert Hearts, the space was so small that everything was kind of front and center, but it was the books you saw first. Sometimes people looked at them if they were too nervous to head right for the good stuff, which must have been the books’ purpose, but no one ever bought them.

I obviously didn’t know what lesbians wanted, but I didn’t think we needed the books to make it a classy place. I thought we should send a more affirming message like, You don’t have to pretend to look at these books . If it were up to me, I would have had one shelf around the store, vibrators on one long wall, harnesses on the short wall, and then dildos on the other long wall, and maybe lube by the register. Very minimal and chic. Kind of like a nice jewelry store, but with softer lighting.

I think I would have done without the sex machine. It was basically a motorized dick and when you plugged it in, the dick flew in and out of the console. It was four hundred dollars and it took up a lot of space on a shelf at the back of the store. On Friday nights drunk women would come in and ask me to turn it on. There was one group that came in almost every week. It was four or five women and they always looked like they had been drinking since noon, and they almost always got out of hand and I had to kick them out. I thought one of them liked me. Her name was Lucy and she hung out by the cash register and didn’t ask questions about any of the merchandise, which I thought was smart. She was my age and pretty and I probably flirted with her more than I should have, but I was bored.

One week she was distracting me, talking about how she could show me around the city if I wanted. She was saying we should go to this restaurant called Carmen’s, if I like Cuban food, which I do, when I looked up and saw the loudest woman, a tiny blonde with a pixie cut and huge boobs, on top of the shelf and on top of the machine, pretending to use it. The other women were laughing hysterically.

“Okay,” I said. “Time to go.”

She didn’t get down and I had to go over and pull her off the shelf with Lucy’s help.

“I want it so bad!” the little blonde said as she was getting down.

All her friends laughed again but I didn’t think she was kidding.

• • •

The next time Pam came in to bring more custom harnesses, she quizzed me about what lesbian bars I liked to go to. I wasn’t ready, so I told her Nadeen worked too much and we didn’t go out.

“You’ve never gone out to a bar,” she said.

I tried to think if I had heard of any. “No,” I said. “Not yet.” I asked her what bars she recommended for our next free night and she squinted at me and said she didn’t know but she thought maybe the younger women went out in Bernal Heights.

“Thanks,” I said.

• • •

I didn’t know if Nadeen worked too much, but Danny did. He stayed late almost every weeknight and went in for full days on the weekends. I tried to be cool like I was when we were in school, when he would disappear for weeks at a time and then come back to me only to pass out cold for another week.

One morning I woke up and Danny hadn’t come home, and as I was leaving for work he came in. He looked like the old Danny, two bruised eyes and a shadow beard.

“I am so sorry,” he said.

“Oh baby,” I said. I hugged him and kissed him on his eyes. “Can you go to sleep now?”

“No,” he said, “I just need to take a shower and change my clothes.”

“Shit,” I said. “Want me to take a shower with you?”

“Not now, babe. I’m sorry.”

He got in the shower and I made toast for him and left.

• • •

The less Danny slept, the more I did. I started getting into bed when I got home and sleeping twelve or fourteen hours until I had to go to work again.

My dad kept calling to harass me. He thought I was lying about the store. On one call I told him it was a lesbian sex toy store, and on another call I gave him the name and the address and told him to look it up if he didn’t believe me. On another call I offered to send him a pay stub. On another call I told him I was trying to get pregnant. I knew I shouldn’t antagonize him, but I couldn’t help it. He seemed so far away, now that I was in San Francisco and he was in Los Angeles, and now that my bank account was no longer attached to his.