I Came Out for This? (20 page)

“Well, it seems to me that you both need a severe beating,” Dr. Bobb said.

“We do, we do,” Nicky said. He turned to me. “So I understand you got a call from the evil bitch,” he said.

“She's not an evil bitch,” I said, feeling a bit protective of my first love.

“She is an evil bitch with you!” Dr. Bobb yelled. Suddenly he was standing in front of me, looming over me like a scary high school principal. “She is trying to lure you back into her den so she can devour you in chunks. Do not let it happen!” I stared at him. He returned to his desk and sat down. He pushed aside his top, folded his hands, and looked at me. “You are going to check in with Nicky twice a day,” he said. “You are going to focus on the positive things in your life.”

“Really,” Nicky said. “She has this woman who loves her like crazy, and this woman is as precious as gold, and she treats her like an old shoe.”

“You are talking about Kimba?” Dr. Bobb said.

“What are you talking about?” I screamed. “Kimba is a good, dear friend! Well, maybe I have a little bit of a crush on her, but we're still
friends
! It's perfectly normal to like your friend and maybe even fool around with her a little. So what? We're
very dear friends
. What's the matter with you people anyway?”

“See?” Nicky said to Dr. Bobb. And Dr. Bobb said, “Yes, I see.”

“Both of you are crazy!” I yelled. “You don't . . .”

“All right, mon!” Dr. Bobb said, waving his hands in front of me. “Let's focus on a less threatening positive in your life. Your writing. What are you writing these days, besides that diary that's exacerbating your neurotic self-involvement?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“I want you to write another article for the
City Rag
,” Dr. Bobb said. “This will boost your self-confidence. Terri turns you into a wimp. The antidote to that is writing. Writing strengthens you. It gets the juice flowing through your body. Good, healthy juice. Not toxic juice laced with the chemical equivalent of cocaine.”

The man is an odd kind of genius. He scored a bull's-eye with the writing suggestion. I had been thinking that I was overdue for a second article. People were forgetting all about my piece on gentrification.

“Okay,” I said. “I'll submit some ideas to the editor.”

“Good, good. When will this happen?”

“Tomorrow,” I said. I meant it, too.

“All right, then. Don't wait till the day after tomorrow.” Dr. Bobb turned his attention to Nicky. “And you, my friend, also require intervention,” he said. Nicky squirmed. “Is this lover boy of yours HIV positive?”

“Yes,” Nicky said. “But believe me, Dr. Bobb, I am very careful. I may be emotionally unstable, but I'm not suicidal.”

“Well, okay, then,” Dr. Bobb said. “I'm happy to know that. But besides that, is Joanna's characterization of him accurate? Is he a sociopath?”

“Yes,” Nicky said. “But what she didn't tell you, Dr. Bobb, is that he's her friend!
She
introduced me to him! He lives in her building and she spoils him rotten, more than I do!”

“Tsk, tsk, tsk,” Dr. Bobb clucked, shaking his head. “This is bad.”

“Well, he is kind of my friend,” I said. “He lives right
on my floor, so we've become friendly. But I never encouraged Nicky to get together with him. It was a total accident. Nicky came to visit one day and Jerome was there and he started flirting with him, and it was like a fluff ball being sucked up into a tornado. What was I supposed to do?”

“You pull the fluff ball out of the tornado. Like this.” Dr. Bobb grabbed his top, sent it into the air, and then grabbed it and slammed it back into the base. I'm surprised the thing didn't break. “Sometimes you have to push against gravity,” he said. He got up out of his chair. “Now get the hell out of here,” he said. “Both of you. I want to see you back here on Monday, Joanna.”

“What about Nicky?” I said. “All I did was answer the phone when Terri called. Nicky is actually in a
relationship
with a destructive force.”

“Nicky has his own therapist,” Dr. Bobb said. He looked at Nicky. “Am I right?” he said. “Aren't you seeing my colleague, Dr. Jordan?”

“No, I am not,” Nicky said. “I quit him after two sessions. Dr. Jordan has the I.Q. of a fish.”

“Nicky!” Dr. Bobb said. “You need to be seeing someone! I know what you mean about Dr. Jordan. I will refer you do someone else.” He started writing on a piece of paper.

“Why can't he see you?” I asked Dr. Bobb.

“Because we are friends, like you and Kimba,” Dr. Bobb said. “You cannot see your friend in therapy.” He smiled at Nicky and Nicky smiled back, the way they had in the hospital the first time they met. I never saw anything like it. They were besotted with each other. I
wanted to make a funny comment, but I was speechless. Together they constitute a force that defies commentary.

When I got home, I realized I hadn't really thought about Terri since I walked into Dr. Bobb's office. Dr. Bobb and Nicky had cleverly distracted me from her. But not thinking about her isn't the same as not
feeling
her. I'm still hovering nauseously in the air. And Bob Bobb can talk all he wants about defying gravity, but it's kind of hard to slam yourself down into your base.

February 2001

This house is turning into a slum.

The respectable people have moved out and street people moved in. Courtly Tomas moved back to Brazil and two baggy-pants thugs moved into his room with a girl that I can tell is a crackhead. The two thugs have already come into my place, pretending to introduce themselves as my new neighbors, but they were just casing my room and now I need to get a double lock. The three of them hang out in Jerome's room with that horrid Calliope and I hear them all shrieking “motherfucker” this and “motherfucker” that except for Jerome, who doesn't curse. Meanwhile Donald got disgusted and left after Ginger and Calliope stole his credit card once too often, and two white druggie-looking sisters moved into his room and whenever I pass them in the hall they give me that eerie look that junkies give you before they get up the nerve to hit you up for money. This afternoon, I saw the two of them hanging out in the hall with the three other charming newcomers, probably plotting with them how to rip people off. They ignored me until I passed and then I know they were looking at me.

The place has gotten filthy. Russell, the manager, used to keep it spotless, but about a month ago Gerald fired him because (according to Russell) he spurned Gerald's advances and Gerald got huffy and said, “Don't come back tomorrow.” So now the carpeted floors are filthy and littered with cigarette butts and the kitchen is solid grease and the living room smells like a zoo and, in fact, the whole place smells like a zoo except for my place which I deodorize with plug-in devices that are probably giving me cancer.

Tommy wanted to visit and I put him off because it has turned into the flophouse that he warned me about and I can't have him come here and see it. I don't want to have my girlfriends over here anymore, although Bette has been here and seems amused by the whole scene. I'm afraid to tell Kimba what's been happening because she's been acting distant since Terri called and I'm afraid she'll say she won't ever come over here again.

Thank God for Johnny and Guillermo. They're still my buddies, and they give me comfort. They hang around with thugs too, but their thuggish Latino buddies are benign compared to the two thugs who moved in here, who have that dangerous look. And the worst thing is that Jerome has become their guru. The thugs and the crackhead go into his room and gather around him while he watches TV and feeds them that slop from Yum's. I don't understand Jerome. He may be a sociopath, but he's also a very bright man. What does he see in them?

Now I'm a monster in the lesbian community because I took Dr. Bobb's advice and wrote another piece for the
City Rag
. It was a funny essay about the play party Terri and I attended last summer, but a lot of lesbos around here don't appreciate my humor.

Without using any identifying information, I wrote about the innocuous “dominatrix” squirting fluid up someone's pussy, and the whipping scene with the bored-looking women, and the anxious guests wandering around in their leather and cop uniforms and the absence of any kind of rebellious mood. I concluded by saying it was a “sorry day” when the S&M contingent of the lesbian community threw a party that had all the electricity of a junior high school dance.

It was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but apparently nobody got it because the following week the paper was full of letters from dykes all over town, spewing vitriol. If you ask me, the letters confirmed my underlying point—that lesbians around here are terrified of appearing too wild or rebellious and prefer to blend into the mainstream. “For Ms. Kane to imply that this sorry carnival represents our
community is outrageous,” wrote an officer of the largest national gay advocacy group in the nation. (I never implied any such thing.) “Sadomasochism is not a custom in our community,” wrote another goody-two-shoes. “It is an aberration.” Another woman wrote that the women were acting out abuse traumas of their childhoods and for me to be ridiculing them was “true sadism.” God. Don't they have a sense of humor around here?

To make things worse, I've gotten little support on the home front. Bette loved my essay and Nicky and Jerome chortled over it, but that was about it. Kimba didn't even bother to call me, and after I called her and asked her what she thought she said she liked my piece but then she abruptly changed the subject, telling me about plans she made with people I didn't even know. Worst of all, yesterday I got this repugnant e-mail from Terri which said, “Good writing, but I'm not sure it was appropriate for
City Rag. The Washington Blade
, perhaps?” I wanted to kill her. The whole point was to make the straight world aware of us, not write something about lesbians and hide it away in the damn
gay Blade
. Since Terri was
with
me at that ridiculous party, I was hoping that she would be amused by my piece, but no! She just
had
to diss it. I hate her with a boiling passion.

I know I'm taking out on Terri all my hurt over those angry letters and Kimba acting so strange. But I can't help it. I'm back to obsessing about her, but now it's in a rageful way. I wish she never sent me that e-mail, but if she didn't say
anything
I would be just as furious. Everyone's sick of hearing it. Bette said, “You knew what she was going to say,” and Tommy said I've gone back to
being a Sputnik circling around her and my sister Queen said I should forget about Terri and concentrate on Kimba, and when I told her Kimba wasn't being very nice she said, “There's probably a good reason for it.”

The most disconcerting reprimand was from Nicky, who said if I couldn't stop carrying on about Terri Dr. Bobb would employ some kind of de-programming technique on me that the two of them discussed. As it turns out, Nicky is seeing Dr. Bobb in therapy, in spite of their unnatural attraction to each other. I'm sure they just sit around and discuss how fucked up everyone is with the exception of them. So now they're plotting to inflict some kind of radical treatment on me just because I'm justifiably upset over no one appreciating my essay.

Maybe I should agree to the treatment. I could end up having the sublime S&M experience that creepy party failed to provide. On second thought, with Dr. Bobb at the controls it could get out of hand. What if he turns me into a salmon or a hamster? I'd better be careful about what I say around Nicky for a while.

Dee broke up with Terri and asked me out, which is wonderful because now I can get back at Missy for trying to destroy me. Also it will be a good distraction from being upset over Kimba, who never even calls anymore and acts like an insolent teenager when I call her. I'm afraid to ask her what's going on because her response might not be nice and I'm too vulnerable to hear it right now. I hate to say it, but men are a lot easier to deal with than women. You always know what they're thinking.

When the phone rang yesterday, a silky voice said, “Joanna?” and when I confirmed my identity, Dee didn't even say who it was, which I thought was cute, that she assumed I knew. She just said, “I loved your piece in the
City Rag
.” She said she laughed all the way through it, and that she agrees with me that our community could use a little more flavor. She said other places she'd lived, like Colorado and California, had real kick-ass lesbians that strutted around in ragged denim vests and spikey hair. “I'm talking about women in their fifties and sixties,” she said. “I never went to their sex parties, but I'm sure they were spicier than this one.” I mentioned that Terri had
been with me at the party and she knew this, and then she said that she and Terri had broken up.

Dee said she got sick of Terri's selfishness. The turning point was their “romantic getaway” in the Shenandoah Valley. She said Terri was sullen and uncooperative and ruined the whole weekend. I said I'd talked to Terri and mentioned the barbecue shack that Dee wanted to drag her to even though she's a vegetarian, and Dee laughed her musical laugh and she, “What a jerk! Did she tell you the reason I wanted to take her there?” She said the place was known for its mock barbecue, and was a
favorite
of vegetarians, and Dee had been talking to Terri about it for weeks and was planning the whole trip around it, and then Terri refused to go just to be spiteful. That was so typical of Terri I laughed and laughed. I assumed this was after Terri had become disenchanted with Dee, because when she's wooing someone she's all “gentlemanly,” but after she becomes disenchanted she's like Idi Amin.