Originally mailed on July 30, 1994
Here I am again, trying to get used to another new city. I swear this is the last place. I'm going to make it or break it here. No more interstate U-Hauls, not for love or money or the hope of a college degree. The cats don't want to move again. They're settled in already, as if Florida and three days of car-motel-car-motel-car never happened, and they're content that this place be home forever. I'm pretty settled, too, at least as much as you can be after only a few days. But you know how it always seems longer than that, like crossing a state line zooms you weeks into the future. I noticed today that I still have scratches on my arm from trying to flea-bathe Fang before we left Florida. I mean, it was only a week ago I wrestled her into the tub and she climbed right back out, up my arm and over my left shoulder (see illustration). I thought I was so clever, going in naked so I wouldn't get water all over my clothes. I've got puncture wounds in places I can't mention in polite society. That was one week ago today. Forgive the cliche but it feels like a million years.
I'm doing all that positive-effort-for-the-good stuff. I've got colorful signs on my walls that say things like, "You have many friends just a phone call away," and "Embrace your new home! Unknown adventures await!" And I've got a list on my bathroom mirror of the steps I need to take to find my next girlfriend:
- Call Lesbian/Gay Hotline for name of local lesbian organization.
- Call local lesbian organization. Get on newsletter mailing list.
- Volunteer to serve on committee.
- Flirt with other women on committee.
- Repeat 3 & 4 as often as necessary until...
- Get someone to go on date.
Maybe you think finding a new girlfriend should not be my first priority. Maybe you think finding a job or making friends is more important. It's not. A new girlfriend is the only sure-fire cure for the New Town Lonelies. A new friend won't rearrange her routine of many years to spend five out of seven nights with me; a new girlfriend will. Dates with a new girlfriend are also highly economical; I can just keep taking her to bed, which is much cheaper than taking her out somewhere. I'm sure you understand -- I've got to watch expenses until I find work.
I did go a dance tonight, but I'm not very good at hanging out where I don't know anybody. I lean against some out-of-the-way wall and drink a Coke and watch the dancers and try to look like I'm totally cool, like it was my plan to get all dressed up and then stand in the shadows while lesbians make merry all around me. I felt like a dork. Especially since Lansing is kind of a smallish city. I felt like all the other woman in the room knew each other, and like they were watching me, wondering who I was and who I would sleep with first and whether I had moved to town for a job, or to escape the ruins of past relationships, or whether I'm just some woman from the farm country sneaking out on my husband of ten years because the housewife next door who I've been fooling around with during Oprah five days a week moved to Vermont with her husband.
Of course, on the other hand I'm afraid nobody noticed me at all, even though I went to the mall this afternoon. I was looking pretty spiffy in my old pink high tops and my new black shirt. Plus, I spent half an hour in the bathroom trying to get the right mousse/hair consistency. You know, enough mousse so your hair does what you want it to but not so much that it's stiff and hard when some woman tries to run her fingers through it.
I felt very intrepid heading out to the dance alone, sure that I'd be slow-dancing with somebody cute within an hour of my arrival, but I stood against the wall and drank half a Coke and it was all I could handle. I was there maybe twenty minutes, half an hour, before I bolted. And now I'm home, depressed, and feeling like, Jeez, what did I expect and why did I even let myself think about a woman running her hand through my hair when I knew perfectly well that it would be a miracle if I even looked anybody straight in the eye?
I miss being in a place where I'm known, recognized. In West Palm I went to dances alone, I went to bars alone, I went to meetings alone, but I always knew there'd be somebody there I knew, and I could maybe sit with them, or just smile across the room, or make small talk at the snack table, or get invited out for coffee after. Nobody here knows me, and it makes me think too much about how I look, the impression I make. I mean, what was I doing going all butch in a black shirt and jeans? That's not me. I knew it as soon as I got home and saw myself in the mirror. Slicked-back hair, indeed!
On the other hand, it seems kind of freeing to be without a history. You would have laughed at me, trying to pull off some cool James Dean routine, but for all those women knew I've been stone butch since I was seven years old, teasing the other little girls into letting me touch them under their lace-bottom panties. And it was a relief to go to a community event and know there'd be no ex-lovers there, no women who'd told me we'd always be friends and never called again, nobody looking like True Love with the woman she left me for, nobody who reminds me of the mistakes I've made or the times I've done a woman wrong. It feels like, here I am in a new town, and maybe it's an opportunity to be someone I've never been before, butch and sexy and always in control. A better dyke than I have ever been. A new town -- this is my chance to finally get it right.
I can hear you thinking, "Isn't that what she said the last time?" Well, this is different. There were circumstances beyond my control in Florida, you know. Stop smirking. Let's do a guided meditation so you can feel some sympathy for me. Close your eyes. (Now you're complaining that you can't close your eyes and read at the same time. Maybe you could get someone to read this part to you. Be resourceful.)
OK, imagine you've just driven 1200 miles with only one break of four hours to sleep by the road. The cats started screaming on the Jersey Turnpike and didn't stop until South Carolina, and you're finally at the home of your lover, the woman you left your previous home to be with, the woman you are supposed to begin living with as of now. You take the cats inside, open the doors to their carriers, and sit down next to your sweetie on the couch. The cats have not even worked up the nerve to come out of their boxes when your lover asks you to move out. You protest that you can't move out because you haven't moved in yet, and she says that's good, because since you left New Jersey less than 48 hours ago, she's fallen in love with someone else.
Now, don't you admit that a woman in that position is starting out with a couple of strikes against her? No wonder I was miserable down there. And the misery continues: the cats are still playing hostess to a generous supply of Florida fleas. At least in Michigan there's a frost to look forward to, the eventual hope of being able to get rid of the little pests. Both cats are all over bites and Speedball is getting a bald spot near her tail (she's allergic). I'd give them another flea bath but Fang shredded me pretty good last time I tried, so until I get a girlfriend and can ask her to hold my cat for me while I do sophisticated Shower Massage kitty torture, we're relying on twice-a-day combings to keep the fleas under control. I drown them in a bowl of water. (Household Hint from Harriet: A little dish soap breaks the surface tension; otherwise the fleas can walk on the water and jump right back out.) I love to see their little carcasses floating belly up.
The cats like the apartment but they miss the Palmetto bugs, which were fun to hunt and apparently mighty tasty, too. I do have a small hole in one window screen, so there are flies coming in to keep the kitties in good hunting form. I especially like it when Fang gets a fly in her mouth and chews while it's still alive-it makes for a wonderfully disgusting combination of buzz and crunch, with Fang simultaneously purring and fierce.
I keep forgetting why I moved here, getting scared about being in a new place and thinking I had it pretty good in West Palm Beach. Now that I'm here I remember riding my bike along the Intracoastal Waterway to the library downtown, or driving to Fort Lauderdale to shop at the women's bookstore, and I forget how it felt to be all alone with a broken heart, how the contrast of my inner pain with the tropical beauty all around me was especially heart-wrenching. It would have been OK, I guess, if I'd been able to make friends, but I didn't click with anybody. Just hung out with a lot of women, trying to have a good time, trying to like them even though they said "queer" like it was a dirty word. Like this: I'm sitting in a restaurant with two women who are lovers, and we're talking about the decor in the restaurant, critiquing its fake-flea-market kind of look, and, with her arm around her lover and absolutely no hint of irony, one of the women says, "Yeah, look at that thing over there -- it's so queer." Sigh.
Well, 5 1/2 months is a new record for "least time spent living in a town I thought I'd be in until I died." Believe it or not.
So are there a zillion cappuccino places around where you live? I can't believe a town this small can support so damn many. I went to one the other day, to have some hot chocolate and write in my journal, and there I was at a table, sipping and scribbling away, and suddenly I felt kind of funny and I looked up and there was a guy off to my right drinking a double decaf cappuccino and reading some book. He was wearing wire-rimmed glasses, khaki chinos, and an argyle sweater vest, and it wasn't just a book he was reading, it was a tome, with some law-related mumbo-jumbo in gold leaf on the spine. And off to my left was a kind of scruffy retro-hippie type with tattoos and an eyebrow piercing; he had his feet up on a chair and a sketchbook on his lap, and he was staring into space, but every few minutes he'd sip his coffee, take a bite of pastry, pick a color from his box of pastels, and sketch a few lines before dropping back into his reverie.
I thought, my god, we could be props, we could be extras: hippie artist, liberal law student, journal-writing lesbian in denim skirt, high tops, and faded Take Back the Night t-shirt; each of us carefully chosen to give the place atmosphere. It occurred to me that there are better places to study, draw, and write in a journal, but we had all gravitated to this coffee shop because, like, that's what we're supposed to do; it's how the self-described high-brow spend their time. And that made me wonder if any of us really wanted to be there, if a single one of us had experienced a genuine desire to sit in hard chairs at little cafe tables and drink overpriced coffee drinks, or if it was just some cultural imperative we'd unwittingly bought into, or if maybe we were in some way posing, so that the other people in the coffee shop would think, "Look at that woman with the labrys earring writing in that book, she must be the most intense and self-aware dyke, she must be working out the answers to the world's problems or trying to figure out which of her many admirers she should become involved with; she must live the leisurely life of the mind, to have an hour in the middle of the day just to write and drink hot chocolate. I would like to know her. I would like her to interrupt her writing, catch my eye, pat the seat next to her, and turn that intense gaze onto me as I sat down at her side."
Argh. It's late -- I should finish this up and get to bed, put the humiliation of this dance behind me. Tomorrow's a new day, a Sunday even so no pressure to job hunt. I wish I hadn't spent five bucks on this damn dance. Not to mention the $12.99 plus tax for the shirt. I could have gone to a matinee or out for a decent lunch tomorrow with that money. Well, maybe I'll go to the movie anyway, throw caution to the wind and buy a big tub of overpriced popcorn, and trust that when I continue my round of print shops on Monday someone will hire me. I need the money, and my fingernails are just too clean. Girls love a butch with grease and ink under her fingernails -- makes'em think she's good with her hands.
Cheers,
© Copyright 1994-1999 Su Penn. Design by David Dierauer.
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