Best Lesbian Erotica 2010

UPPERCASING Charlie Anders

My name is Daphne Gottlieb. I was born on New Jersey’s very last family dairy farm. My dad had a theory about cows in wind tunnels. I got into Rutgers, but I decided to take a year off to stretch my horizons.

All my friends tried to tell me San Francisco was over, Yuppie fucked. Go to Austin, or Portland instead. But I had a feeling about San Francisco. Maybe it was those big eager dog heads, with the chef hats. San Franciscans preserve those diner statues, and any time you carry one of them down the street, a parade just forms behind you. They close the street. Does Portland have dog heads? Hellz no.

I don’t know what I expected when I got to the Sucka Free. A coolness test? An initiation? I was all braced for whatever. Unstoppable. Eighteen years, I’d played nice. I’d germinated in Hot Topic and boat shoes, and everybody called me a good kid. I didn’t want to do drugs, listen to shitty music or have unsafe sex, like the rebels at Dearly High, but I rebelled on the inside. I saved up my “Fuck-you-world” until it could do some good.

When I got to SF, I went to every freak event in the Mission or SOMA. I bit my tongue for ages before I could introduce myself to people. And then people reacted. But not to me, to my name. Eyes far out, mouths open. “No way,” and stuff. It turned out there was a big-deal performance artist named after me. Or the other way around. She just wasn’t famous in New Jersey. “You mean you didn’t know?” one girl said. “Daphne Gottlieb! She wrestled a stop sign and won!”

I knew about performance art. When I was eight my mom took me to see “street theater” in Bergen. Two guys dressed up as cows did the Macarena except they changed the word Macarena to factory farming. Not even as entertaining as it sounds. I don’t know why my mom thought I needed to see that, but it was part of her pattern: months of tennis and needlework, and then the occasional twitchy attempt to expose me to Culture. Mom found all her culture on AOL.

This one person spent an hour gushing to me about Daphne’s “BLOGGING IN BLOOD” performance, which she did in the window of the Mission Art Hole, facing the street. She had a computer with a big screen, so the passersby could see her blog entries as she typed them on a keyboard with razors sticking out of every key. (Except the spacebar, which just had sharp edges all around.) As she typed, she bled. The keys got stickier, and then she was faint from loss of blood. cant type ne more, OMG swimmin fishies in my eyez why do u all hurt me i need protean bringme a SLIMJIM now now now. its all yr fault, all yr fault, all yr fault, I HATE YOU ALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL LLLLLLLL.

By the time I met the other Daphne, I’d been hearing about her for a month. The longer it went, the more nervous and curious I got. One night I worked up the courage to go to a lesbian club night, Toast, or Crash, or Joint. One neon-ish spotlight, half a mirror ball. We all danced right next to a sharp-elbowed pool game. I had bruises for days.

And then my namesake came between me and the strobe. She towered over me, with jet-black dreds and tattoos and all. She looked at me. I tried to look back but the light was in my eyes. I shouted my name in her ear. She said she knew who I was.

We went to a taqueria. She bought me some nachos and studied the way I tried to eat without being messy. In normal light, her eyes looked warmer. I’d pictured her being twitchy and neurotic. But she just sat, feet up on another chair, holding a bottle between two fingers like a huge cigarette. Nodding, while I told her all about my own personal Daphne Gottlieb Experience so far.

When I’d finished, she nodded some more. Looked at me from every angle, top to bottom. “Interesting,” she said. “Potential.”

And she told me more about The Performance Scene. Like, there’s a hierarchy of fluids: applesauce at the bottom, semen at the top. (Blood is up there, but semen wins because it subsumes blood.) She told me about life as a femme, and explained all about the queer scene. I didn’t know sexuality could be so complicated. Are you a vorpal bottom or a lateral domme? Do you use safewords or danger-grams?

And then I mentioned I had a hard time getting into clubs like the one where I’d met her, because I was under twenty-one. And I had no fake ID. Then she reached into her purse and pulled out her drivers license. She handed it to me: “Now you do.”

The sun scared me. It rushed the one big window of Daphne’s apartment, like it was going to ram us. (The window had teeth made out of empty beauty-product bottles, and velvet lips.) One second, it was the middle of the night and I was telling the local Daphne what passed for my secrets. And then a second later, I was dawn-blind. I hadn’t realized we’d stayed up all night. I remembered at some point around four A.M., Daphne had taken photos of me in my underwear from every angle, “to document the process,” she’d said.

We had bonded so hard, I still felt high all the next day, even with the sleep deprivation. As if I’d found my soul mate along with my namesake. This Daphne didn’t look all that different from the Goth-punk kids at my school, but she rocked the theatricality in everything. I would have been happy enough to be her audience, but she treated me like a fellow performer. Somehow she didn’t realize how lame I was, even after I told her my whole story.

Daphne showed up half an hour late for our meeting a couple days later at the bowling-alley-sized CD store. But then she made an Entrance. Alligator boots, crocodile corset, elbow-length lizard gloves, all jet black and faux. I stood there in my polo shirt and peasant skirt, wondering if I was in the wrong music video. Since I was new in town and knew no one, I didn’t want to crowd her. I stayed ready to vanish at the slightest hint: a tongue click, whatever, I would be gone. And yet, she seemed excited to have me around.

We shopped all over the Haight, the two Daphnes. She helped me pick out a pair of boots, chunky platforms that lifted me to her height. My eyes could meet hers halfway all of a sudden, and she gave me that smile again, the one that put me on the inside. Her face looked so normal, at the center of all the display, and maybe that’s why I felt comfortable. And then I twirled on my high boots and saw all the people in the store, suddenly dwarves to me, scurrying below my eye line. They all looked up at me, as if I could rain fire on them.

Daphne took me out, presented me to her friends. “Let me introduce you to Daphne Gottlieb!” People thought it was hilarious. Hot butches and steely femmes flirted with me. I didn’t know what to do with the attention. Daphne said she’d teach me.

Five in the morning, our fifth or sixth time hanging out, she dyed my mousy hair black. She helped me turn it into dreds. I started practicing her gestures. Saying things like, “Fucking yes and no,” or “Hierarchies of teleology, bitch.” I started wearing black clothes with lots of buckles and straps, like her.

I wasn’t sure if I was an art project or a fashion accessory—or what the difference was between the two.

Soon people could hardly tell us apart. We went to sex raves together. She taught me to circle left while she circled right. Then we could wave hi to all the people and find a spot where nobody was fucking or sucking to hold court. At one party, two rival slam poets’ tongue piercings were padlocked together. They were naked. It was awesome.

At another party, Daphne told me to strip, and stand with my hands and feet as stretched as possible. “Look at her body,” she said to the group of people in black. “It’s pristine. No scars, no ink, nothing. It’s not like a blank canvas, because no canvas ever arrives this clean. It’s ridiculous to have such an untouched adult body.” She ran her gloves over my breasts, armpits, thighs. I quivered. Daphne fingered me to orgasm while her friends agreed that in fact my body was inscribed by virtue of not being inscribed.

She took me to a tattoo parlor where all the artists were punk music stars. She removed her shirt and mine, so they could see where the tattoos should go. She pointed out some of the finer details of her tattoos, and the artist, Stigma, nodded. Daphne stayed the whole time, just to make sure Stigma copied her right. It hurt like a bitch, but my other half held my hand and petted my nose.

I went with Daphne when she did her performances. I was a decoy for critics, as well as assistant. One time, she was a “textural DJ.” She took over the Ruby Skye night club. She had carpet swatches, fur pieces and drywall samples, all record shaped. She put them on the turntables, so people could come up and feel the smoothness or fluffiness as they went around and around. Some clubbers got pissed because they wanted to dance, but they were missing the point. She was commenting on how people never think about the fact that they’re dancing on and within surfaces, and they privilege the sounds over the textures. And what about deaf people? She was proudest of the time she remixed a marble slab with some cow leather. She wore headphones, but they just had a loop of someone saying, “You’re the greatest DJ, keep it up, you’re rocking the decks,” et cetera.

This was the life I didn’t even know I was seeking in San Francisco, and now I’d found it. The only trouble was, it was her life. The other Daphne.

I concentrated every minute on being her, even though I didn’t know what this was all for. Was I being apprenticed, or just turned into a Daphne amplifier? I almost didn’t care, because I was enjoying all the attention so much. Maybe I was an heir. I just knew asking too many questions would spoil everything.

We were sitting on her bed, early one morning, and she showed me the autobiography of James Brown. In it, he tells how he was born James Brown but hustled to become JAMES BROWN. At the end, he explains that James Brown is a real person, but JAMES BROWN is made up. JAMES BROWN belongs to everyone.

“That’s it, you know,” Daphne said. “That’s what it’s all about. We’re all born with normal capitalization, but our task in life is to create the block-caps versions of ourselves. And most people never even try. Most people stay mostly lowercase, their whole lives.”

I asked her if she had succeeded in becoming DAPHNE GOTTLIEB. (I made a big uppercase D and G with my fingers.) But she said no. At most, she had managed to make the lowercase letters in her name a little bigger. Uppercasing was a time-consuming process, it took years and only a very few people ever achieved it.

I thought to myself that maybe between the two of us, we could make one DAPHNE GOTTLIEB. But I didn’t say it aloud.

She didn’t touch me for weeks after she fingered me in front of her friends. I started to wonder if she had just been showing off and wasn’t really attracted to me. That would be okay, I guessed. But it made me a little antsy, wondering what I was to her.

And then, once the tattoos were done and the Vaseline bandages came off, she asked me if I wanted to go to a women’s sex party. I was like, hell yeah. It happened in this old dot-com office, but they’d added manacles to all the walnut paneling. By the time they scrunched my clothes into a paper bag, leaving me naked except for my boots, I felt connected to this amazing sex-radical women’s community that went back generations before I was born.

Daphne asked me if I’d ever seen a sling before, and at first I thought she meant something medical. The air felt denser than normal air, like a mixture of scents and sounds were gathering around me: hot, sweet. I felt tallow-headed. The sling turned out to be like a hammock, except solid and with loops to hold my legs up and apart.

“I’ve always wanted to see the look in my own face when someone fists me,” Daphne said. “And now I can.”

She stared into my eyes with a dreadful tenderness. She fingered me, like last time, but then she worked a couple of fingers inside. I noticed some other women standing nearby and watching, and I almost closed my eyes. But I kept them open, so the other Daphne could see them. And then she had her whole hand inside me, and I was coming stronger than ever before. Waves and waves. People cheered.

After that, she started fucking me in public every weekend. She flogged me at the Citadel. She cut me at the Screwup party, with sterile instruments that she put in a biohazard box afterward. She play-pierced my boobs at a breast-cancer fundraiser. She ass-fucked me with a strap-on at a gay photographer’s private gallery in SOMA, surrounded by pictures of leathermen hanging from spiderweb chains.

“Do you want her?” she asked a bald guy with a handlebar mustache, who did something with scrap metal. “Don’t you think she looks hot like this?” I was bent over the table at the leather-daddy photo studio in SOMA, while her strap-on rocked in and out of me. My dreds splashed like an oil spill across the tabletop. The bald guy agreed that yes, I looked hot. “You can borrow her,” my opposite number said. “Wanna?” And that was that. He took me home and licked me, just licked me, his mustache making me twitch and leaving little bumps on my skin. After that, she loaned me out sometimes. If you think you’ve fucked Daphne, it could have been me instead.

It started to freak me out, being just a function of another Daphne. The only thing I accomplished when I went out alone was to contribute to her ubiquity. People waved to me on the street all the time, and I didn’t always know if they were waving at me or at her. Valencia Street was a minefield. Everybody said you couldn’t tell the two of us apart, unless you knew her well and got in close.

I had an annoying phone conversation with my parents, where they asked me if I was succeeding in “finding myself.” Which was a total cliché, and not at all what I had planned to do with my year off. But after I got off the phone, I did feel a weird twinge of lostness. Like I’d accidentally married and given up my maiden name, and I’d only just noticed because my married name was the same. I decided to take some time off.

Without telling the Prime Gottlieb anything, I took a day off from my bookstore job and walked to Ocean Beach, where the surfers couldn’t give a shit about performance art. I watched the waves and ate noodles. I thought about calling Daphne 1.0 to tell her where I was, but fuck that. I sat and watched the waves, and drank three espressos, and looked at a cute dog, and read both weekly papers and the neighborhood broadsheet. And watched the waves some more. And counted N-Judah trains.

Okay, so I got kind of bored.

Daphne-Alpha hadn’t even noticed I was gone. She was trying to build the world’s largest banana out of tapioca and mango skins, in her bathtub. “In the future,” she said, “all art will be organic.”

Something about the contrast, her dark clothes against the white tub and the bright yellow peels, was so vivid I knew I’d remember it forever. I felt full of affection for her. I was a reflection of her, but she wasn’t a reflection of me. She was a whole person, who’d come up with a whole school of mango art while I was staring at the ocean and thinking about noodles. (Like, did you ever wonder where the word noodle comes from? It sounds German. Like strudel. But poodle is French, right? Or is it?)

So all of a sudden I felt ashamed of having wanted to abandon her, and I wanted to make it up to her. And my mind swerved back to the idea of the two of us making a single DAPHNE GOTTLIEB.

“So, hey,” I said. “I noticed you haven’t had a show at the Mission Art Hole in like a few months. And Stucco McSandblaster does a performance there every other week. We should rattle some cages, hey?”

“Fuck the Mission Art Hole,” Daphne said, not turning away from the mango skins she was stapling together in the bath.

“Yeah, I know, they’re totally lame. But I just think it would be good exposure to—”

Daphne finally turned her dark, unblinking eyes on me, and I stepped back without meaning to, plus I didn’t want tapioca stains on my new shirt. She held my gaze with hers. “Fuck. The. Mission. Art. Hole.” She kept staring me down.

I blinked and stammered that yes, fuck them, fuck them all over and then tell them to fuck the fuck off. Fuck those fuckers anyway. But D-Alpha had already turned back to her project, which she was planning on slingshotting at the mayor.

Okay, so she didn’t like the Mission Art Hole anymore. That just meant I had to work a little harder to get us more exposure. Success comes from organization, right? While she worked on her giant banana, I got on her computer and created a spreadsheet of every single art space in the city and when, if ever, she’d last performed there. And how many times. Then I added columns for Stucco, Dollar-Store Molly and a few other local performers, so she could compare their gigs with hers. It took me six hours.

Somewhere during that time, D. had gotten naked and was trying to wrestle the giant banana into shape. I still had my black leather pants and wife-beater on, so for once I looked more like her than she did. I held the iBook over the edge of the tub so she could look at my awesome spreadsheet, but she turned away and pushed the big banana head between us. I tried explaining a second time what I’d done, but she wouldn’t look. She thanked me, but not like she was really grateful. And then she sent me home because she was tired and needed the whole bed to herself.

After that, I didn’t see her for a couple of days. And then we hung out again, and she seemed friendly and mellow. She told me all about her friend who had a webcam performance art deal, and we went to a Jewish orgy where she turned me into a human dreidl using bondage tape and a vibrator. I spun on my ass, naked, while people sang the “made it out of clay” song. It was pretty intense.

And then I didn’t see her again for a few days, because the banana wasn’t aerodynamic and she had a grant proposal. I worked extra hours at the bookstore and practiced my gestures. I almost called her a few times, but I bit my hand. At last, another Friday cranked around and she asked me to a backward-alphabet party, and that was fun. And then more days apart. She had a date with someone else. She went out of town. She was juggling dogs, and I would just make them nervous. Et cetera. Et cetera.

So what was I supposed to do? I started going out on my own more.

At parties, people asked if I was the real Daphne and I said yes. I mean, I’m not imaginary, am I? The only problem was when they wanted me to do some art piece, and I had to make something up. The first couple times that happened, I just froze. Then I tried getting naked and using canola oil to denounce our reliance on fossil fuels, and that seemed to go well, even though at the time, I couldn’t remember where canola oil came in that whole performance-fluid hierarchy.

I started getting into it. I was already doing a kind of performance, being the other Daphne, but now I was performing on top of that performance. Why not? More layers! The next time people asked me to do something, I was all ready with a whole poi-spinning/butoh/breakdancing commentary on the homogenization of mass culture. And then just as I reached the handspringing climax, I noticed Daphne #1 standing near the doorway, staring between her feet.

“You’re actually not too bad,” she said afterward, back at the taqueria where we hung out that first time. “For a beginner, anyway. But you do need to find your own art. And you know, symbols work best when they have a literal meaning besides whatever they symbolize.” Tortilla steam settled all around us, sour and starchy, like it could conduct electricity.

“So you’re not mad at me? I mean, I was trying to be helpful. You know, with the uppercasing.” I made a capital D and G with my fingers. “I mean, just imagine if you could be performing in two places at once. Or all the time.”

“Daphne, listen to me.” She put down her burrito and took my face in her hands. Her fingers were probably a little greasy, but I didn’t want to ruin the moment. “That James Brown autobiography I showed you. He wrote it in the mideighties. Do you know what happened to him after that?”

“He got into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame.”

“No! Well, yes. But besides that.”

“He died.”

“Before that.”

“He invented a new dance?”

The wiser of us Daphnes sighed and abandoned my face for her burrito. “Look it up,” she said. “The point is, uppercasing. It comes with a cost, especially if you’re not careful.” She talked some more, about always keeping a window open to your real self, even your bone-deep boring self. Later, I wished I’d written it all down. But at the time I just thought to myself that if any of this stuff was worth saying, Daphne would have found a way to say it with giant airborne fruit.

The next week or so after that was kind of nice. We stayed in a lot, just the two of us, reading or playing Twister. I wondered a couple of times if Daphne was just trying to keep me hidden, so I couldn’t embarrass her any more. But I figured she knew she could just order me to vanish.

Every now and then, I’d glance at the mouthy window and notice the sun was out or it was raining or it was night. It was nice to be shut-ins, like little old ladies or people who were boycotting everything. I never had a boyfriend or girlfriend in high school, so I soaked up the novelty of feeling like half of a couple. Maybe I’d finally arrived, here in this yellow one-bedroom with the lumpy futon. Crimson and clover, like Joan Jett said. Crimson and motherfucking clover.

And then Daphne wanted me to go to an orgy with her, for the first time in ages. She took me to this little hidden trapdoor in the bathroom at a particularly grimy coffee shop near 16th Street. Underneath the café was a huge dungeon that ran along Valencia Street, all the way to 24th. The basements of every single boutique, bookstore and tapas restaurant turned out to be connected, and they were all full of people fucking or being tortured. Walking through one of the connective tunnels, you could just hear the people over our heads, talking about white-trash caviar, or the old-new narrative, or what kind of waist you were supposed to wear this year. But underneath, a group of women were electric-shocking each other. And there was a circle-jerk in a centrifuge.

I asked what the party was for, and the original Daphne said it was my going-away party. She tied me to a giant wheel, and I lost count of how many people spanked or nibbled or bit me, while Daphne’s strap-on got bigger and bigger inside me. I felt hyperaware of everything happening to me and around me, and yet I barely knew I existed. I shouted myself hoarse and kept shouting, spinning and climaxing. When they finally stopped, I was so exhausted I fell asleep, still tied to the wheel.

I woke up in New Jersey, my dreds shaved off, wearing the denim overalls I’d worn on my first day in San Francisco. I was just a few blocks from my parents’ house, so I walked home. I sneaked inside, not ready to talk to Mom and Dad. I didn’t hear anybody home, so I went upstairs and slumped in the shower. As I washed myself, all my tattoos peeled, leaving fresh skin underneath, a little pink. I tried to hold them in place, but they slipped through my hands. My skin blanked out. When I looked down, all my ink had pooled in the drain, in the shape of a lowercase d. I started to cry into the showerhead.