Devilcountry (19 page)

LISA STANDS AT THE DOOR AND THINKS

Lisa
tapped on the door slowly and lightly.  Methodically.   She
wanted it to be the perfect knock.  
The knock that would
usher her into their lives.
 
Into his life.
 She couldn’t wait to see the baby.  Kevin.  
Ten
months old, drooling, a crawler, no teeth.
 Lisa had studied her
revised version of
Babies and Jew,
a playful take on child rearing from
a feminist Jewish perspective given to her by a lesbian classmate and
ex-girlfriend, Ronit Schlosselberger-Schwartz, from Princeton, who had just
conceived through artificial insemination.  The book had caused yet
another rift between her and Ronit. Who were unsteady friends throughout the
last ten
years.
 The book cut too close to Lisa’s
core.  It made Lisa feel vulnerable.  She was drawn to Ronit because
Ronit had defied all paradigms.  Ronit was the archetypal Jewish lesbian
Lisa had a slight flirtation with while in the freshman dorm.  Ronit was
strong, healthy,
short-haired
, non-nose-jobbed,
Indigo-Girled, and proud of it.  If you were handing out brochures for
Jewish girls interested in exploring their college lesbianism, Ronit would be
on the cover.  She and Lisa became “from the waist up” lovers for a time
with plenty of groping and
dry-humping
but that
time initial honeymoon time expired when Ronit reached downstairs and tried to
interrogate Lisa
,
which Lisa completely chickened-out on.

“We should be studying,” said an extremely
nervous Lisa.  As she grabbed Ronit’s arm and pushed it away from her
waist.  “We might have diseases or something.  We shouldn’t be doing
this.”  Lisa grabbed up Camille Paglia’s
Sexual Suspect
and began a
random chapter.  Although Ronit was distraught and had a serious case of
“chick blue balls”, she respected Lisa for her decision to go straight.
 Ronit grabbed up her book of Haikus she had written for the moment and
was gone.

A few weeks later after picking up a flyer which
had made its way from Harvard depicting one of her favorite off-campus
professors granting fellatio to a donkey Lisa spearheaded a movement that would
ban the photoshopping of any four-legged mammal (with the exception of some rare
pachyderms used in Hindu ceremonies).  But Ronit took it to the next
level.  Ronit took the same picture of the Donkey and made it hump John
Harvard.  Circulated a cool thirty thousand copies around Harvard Yard,
breaking Rick’s record.
 
The caption
read, “ASS UP YOUR ASS, HARVARD!”  Things boiled over at a poetry slam
Ronit had organized.   At first Lisa was excited for the event
because Ronit would be the headliner and watching her speak was better than
sex.  Ronit was a rock star, working the crowd into
a
frenzy
.  It started as a five-minute burst on the asshole
who
had put the flyer up.  But twenty-five minutes into
it Ronit was still going.  She was channeling it from beyond.  Verse
after verse championing women’s rights and the female form. Much like the
legendary thirty-minute jam session by The Allman Bros known as “Whipping
Post”, this was the “Whipping Post” of Feminist-oriented spoken word
performances.  Recordings of it circulated on the web for years.

By the end of it the crowd was
fired
up. Jumping up and down yelling, “Fuck ‘em up! Fuck ‘em
up!”
Over and over again.
 
Ronit
leading the charge.
 The slam ended and things cooled off.  
A group of people were
in the front lobby hugging and
shaking hands with Ronit.  Thrilled at meeting their new leader.
 Lisa stared at her from across the room.  
So proud
of her friend but also intimidated.
 As Lisa began to make steps
toward Ronit to congratulate her and maybe rekindle their romance a Romanian
exchange student who was five foot ten, long, lean and gorgeous wearing a
Michelle Shocked concert shirt stepped right in and started talking to Ronit.
 Ronit knew her from her Vaginal Studies class.  Within five
sentences they were making out. People started applauding, laughing,
cat-calling
.  Ronit blushed with the exposure.
 Plavka didn’t care.  They kept at it.  Ronit had been the
victor.  Her speech was
ass-kicking
.  
Her star now on the rise.
 Plavka had presented
herself.  Ronit had met her queen.

Teary-eyed, Lisa ran out.  She was angry.
 Angry that Plavka had stepped in.  
Angry that some
asshole had put up some stupid flyer, causing all of this bullshit to happen.
 Lisa swore revenge.  She slammed the door of her dorm room behind
her and sat on the bed.
 
She allowed
herself fifteen minutes to cry quietly so no one could hear.  She piled up
all of her Feminist books up in the middle of the room and got them all into a
trash liner.  The only thing she kept was a biography of Marilyn Monroe,
who was to Lisa, the ultimate feminist and woman.  Her rage seethed
through her.  
Leaking off the bed and splattering
against the bare walls and bookshelves.
 
If I ever get my hands
on the bastard who made that flyer I’ll kill him!  You hear me, God?
  From
that point on, even though she loved cock, she was wary of men.  She dove
into her writing, at which she was profound.  There would be sex in her
future but no love.  Love was weakness.

It seemed weird that Ronit and Plavka were going
to have a kid.  Plavka would carry it. Ronit would be the dad.  There
was no mention of the sperm donor.  They became quite suburbanite in their
own way, resulting in the giving of said book to Lisa.  She felt
conflicted.  Lisa felt Ronit had sold out yet still admired her greatly
for becoming a parent. She admired Plavka even more.  Even though Lisa was
predominantly heterosexual she still felt like she could have been Ronit’s true
love.  She could have been a good wife and an even better mom.  She
pushed down the pain.

Ronit had become a human rights activist, writer
and speaker.  Traveling the world, championing women’s rights and making
great strides in breaking pipelines that were involved in human trafficking.
 Two
best-sellers
out, a column in The New York
Times and she was up for her own pundit show on one of the cable networks.  
It wasn’t anger she felt towards Ronit
,
it
was envy
.  Ronit was alive, passionate and on her way to saving the
world with her queen by her side.  Lisa had made a shit-ton of easy money
off of projects that never got made.    Lisa was just a girl in
showbiz.  Ronit was an icon.  

Ronit and Plavka had a son.  Eight pounds
two ounces.  Malcolm Angela Che Petrovich-Schlosselberger-Schwartz.
 As happy as she was for the both of them it hurt Lisa to think about how
happy and fulfilled they must be.  The baby was perfect to Lisa.  
A stunning creation.
 She couldn’t get past it.

It was in one of her writing classes where Lisa
would meet Steven “God” Bergeshwharzz. She found him benign but pleasant.
 She was wary of men still, but Steven was okay.  Steven longed for
Lisa.  
He was struck by her
.  When she would
come into class in her sweats with her hair up and a jacket around her he was
taken.  And she knew his name.  

“Hi Steven.” she said as they walked in
together.  He melted at the sound of her saying his name.  He knew
she was a writer.  He couldn’t write for shit.  He would buy poetry
from freshmen and pass it off as his own in an effort to woo her.  Lisa
knew the poetry wasn’t his because she had done a paper on two of the poems he
gave her.  One was by Shel Silverstein.  She knew Steven loved her,
and although flattered, she saw him as substandard academically and would
therefore not be a satisfying boyfriend.  They would remain at “just
friends” status for the duration of their time at Princeton.  After graduation
Steven amassed an empire.  He moved up from the mailroom of a major agency
and quickly became an agent extraordinaire.  He poached some key clients,
hate-sexed a few supermodels, put together a few deals worth a billion dollars
and gave himself the nickname “God”. He would prove to Lisa his worth, somehow.
 Until then, he would give her all she asked for. Lisa knew he’d do
anything for her.  After things had settled for her a bit she was feeling
lonely. She was hesitant to date anyone but she felt a bit empty and the words
weren’t coming like they used to so she decided to try.  She knew she
could ask God for anything so she asked for Chet, one of his clients.  God
bit his ego, which wasn’t easy.  Reluctantly humbled, he hooked her up.

They dated for two years after God had them meet
in his office for a chance encounter. He claimed he needed both of their input
for casting choices for some new pile-of-shit mid-morning talk show in
development.  God noticed Lisa notice Chet.  It hurt, but he thought
about the three supermodels and the
lazy-susan
of
porn-stars he had been dining off of and decided to take the hit.
  Lisa liked what she saw.  Chet was tall and lanky, thin but
broad-shouldered with plenty of Protestant good looks and charm and he knew how
to dress,
great cargo pants
,  
she
thought. Which was a plus for Lisa.  Had he
been wearing pleats, it would have been over before it began.

He was an up and coming humorist with a
development deal.  He had a one-panel cartoon running in the local hipster
rag.  
Spermy
detailed the wacky adventures and goings-on of an
ejaculated sperm in search of a home.

Chet was smitten with Lisa the moment he saw
her. He knew nothing of Jewish culture.  He didn’t even understand what
exactly a Jew was and wanted to learn, and boy would he.  He had seen
Fiddler
on the Roof
as a child and upon its conclusion he felt a sense of sadness
he couldn’t quite describe.   He would later find out, during an
intense therapy session with a firmly Freudian psychologist he had been exposed
to the feeling known as
Jewish guilt
.  He’d known guilt before.
 Lying to his mother when he’d stolen cookies from the cookie jar.
 But nothing
like
this.  Chet left the
office perplexed, yet aroused.

Within two years of dating, he was so lost under
a cloud of her neuroses he didn’t know what to do.  So, two hours after a
fight over him wanting to get married and have children, he stormed out on her
and on the advice of a lawyer friend who’d had a life-changing moment of
clarity underneath a stripper back in Florida, Chet received the lapdance of a
lifetime from “Candy” at the Spearmint Rhino in Van Nuys.  He felt dirty
being in the valley, but he didn’t want to be seen by the locals on the West
Side, where he and Lisa had been living together.  Lisa had been
withholding sex from Chet for almost three months, and
their
last attempt was not what anyone would consider to be dignified.  He was
barely erect after a few mechanical tugs on his rod with her hand.  She
stopped and said, “Just do it already.”  She turned onto her stomach,
brought her knees up and let out a huge shrug as she placed a pillow under her
chest for support.  Chet slowly mounted behind her as she hit the remote
and watched a segment on
Entertainment Tonight
detailing John Tesh’s
brand new Christmas record.  All proceeds would go to charity.  It
was over quickly.  Neither of them finished.  

Chet had offered a proposal several times.
 He wasn’t getting the message.  She wanted him out of her life.
  Lisa had no desire for nuptials.  
Certainly not
to Chet.
 Lisa loved writing.  Writing was her marriage
partner.  And she was faithful. More important she loved her career. The
problem was Lisa loved children.  Adored them.  She’d secretly watch
Pixar cartoons over and over.  
Anything Disney, Dr. Seuss,
Curious George.
 She loved it all.  
The
stories, the kids, the vibe.
 Sometimes the sounds of playgrounds
would hypnotize her.  They were innocence.  
Her own
childhood flashing back to her in waves.
 Playing four
square
with Bobby Goldberg, Keith Bridgewater and Stacey
Bennett.
 
The
sounds of children laughing, screaming, and crying.
 She missed her
childhood,
mainly she missed all of the playground
time.  Life was simple on the playground.
 
Run, jump, laugh, scream and repeat.
 She knew she wanted kids but the marriage part?  Not for her.
 She saw what it did to her highly divorced parents back home in Jersey.
 She wasn’t going to experience that.  
Her father’s
selfishness and wandering eye.
 Her mother’s lost dreams of acting
on Broadway.  No way.  

The first time Chet proposed marriage was
completely fancy and appropriate. No normal girl would have refused it. They
sat on a log in Yosemite National Park, on a
week-long
excursion into the wild.  She balked, not saying yes or no, just staring
at the ring he had placed in her palm and then walking away with it.  The
rest of the trip was awkward. Chet tried to rationalize and poured his pain
into
Spermy,
his cartoon. But it was an externalised pain.  Not
intrinsic.  To Chet, he didn’t see the rejection as being something in him
that was faulty.  He saw it as womanly doubt that needed to be patiently
whittled down.  This was how his puritanical forefathers engaged in
pursuance of the one they loved, and this is how he would too.  Therefore,
Chet was resolute in his beliefs.  Undeterred, he would ask her again, six
times in fact, at steadily, decreasingly, unimpressive locations, starting with
parks and beaches, followed by a roller skating rink, an underground parking
garage after a Laura Linney movie, in line at the pharmacy while waiting for
her birth-control pills and the last time while they were in the drive-thru at
a Del Taco two blocks from their apartment.  Lisa stared at the ring, and
sucked on her Diet
Coke which
was now emptying fast.
Eye-balling
back and forth between the ring and her drink.
 The only sound in the car was the strange gurgling made when the straw
had sucked out most of the liquid with nothing but non-sugary droplets left to
syphen out.