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| This poster was at the top of the stairs to his apartment and is probably why the whole ribbons thing. |
At the Basement Rave Place, there was a long grimy beige couch across from the unisex (that’s Nineties for all-gender) bathroom where we’d go to recover after we danced too much. I remember it as sort of a heap of dance-tired limbs, four to seven people on the couch at any given time. He reminded me way later that once on said couch I handed him my underwear, no doubt soaked with sweat and excitement. (Gotta hand it to nineteen-year old me for the brazenness! Love it so much!) With a deliciously smug nod, he balled them up and put them in his shirt pocket and patted his chest happily. Ohboy that smile.
(Sidenote: Dear Pagan Boy, can you dirty-haunt me
ASAP? If anyone can, it’s you. I don’t really believe in an afterlife but you’d
be a makeout king there.)
I named him Pagan Boy, but really he was the first one
to properly touch me like a MAN. Plus, my love of fat fingers has been well
documented. (Are you there, Fireguy? It’s me, nostalgic!) Almost thirty years
later, I can feel the warm confidence of his hand as he not-subtle-at-all pushed
up my pink polyester dress. (Whenever I wasn’t wearing a black vintage slip, I
was wearing something a diner waitress might wear in an indie movie. This dress
had such a cute pointy white collar and little pearly buttons.)
I lay toward him across his lap as he slipped his fingers
lazily up and down, sometimes thumbing my clit but mostly just meandering,
leisurely. Absolutely no one around us cared, if they even noticed. Around us
was a blur of fake fur and glitter and hot androgynous hairstyles—sort of a
Bladerunner aesthetic except cuddly. The rhythm of his slippery fingers was tuned
to the constant pulse of techno, mostly house. I don’t think it ever really left
my ears from about ’93 to ’96.
He pushed his fingers inside me and I kissed him to
quiet myself, though any sound I would’ve made would have been swallowed up by,
I don’t know, the Mortal Kombat theme song.
The kissing was urgent, like we might accidentally
devour each other down to the bones, but his hands stayed slow.
The drive from the club to his house was at least an
hour long, but he was an expert at driving one-handed. In the 3am dark, I sat
in the passenger seat with my legs spread and my sweaty, be-glittered head on
his shoulder, breathing in his ears or just breathing in the smell of him—earth,
beer, testosterone, cigarettes—a smell you could lay down and cozily die in.
We stumbled up the steps of his apartment, tangled in
each other and losing clothes as we went. The sun was coming. As we cuddled
into his too-small bed, he held my face, stared into my eyes, and kissed me
some more. There wouldn’t be sleep.