Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [59]
“I been to Rhode Island once. Weird place, but all North is weird to me. They talk too fast and ask too many questions.” She lit a cigarette. A big black-and-gray tomcat walked over and plopped in her lap. She began to stroke him without looking down.
“Cats OK, huh?”
“Mine are. They’ve driven off everybody else’s in the building. Even old Ghost Dance there wakes up when a strange cat comes around, eats them up, and runs them off.” She looked pleased at the thought. “Us sleepy-looking types are dangerous when threatened, you know.”
“Oh, I know. I been messed with myself a time or two.” I dropped my bag and pulled out the stack of her apartment ads I’d torn off the bulletin board over at the Women’s Center. I handed them to her and gave her my own slow grin. “I got no problem with going next door if I want to talk politics and I don’t cook much anymore, so the kitchen is yours to keep. I don’t smoke. I do karate, and I like to play pool, though I’m not much good at it. I work days up the street at the camera store, and I want this apartment real bad.”
She grinned and shook her head. “You take down all my ads?”
“Think so, all I saw anyway. I asked around about you. Sounds like you and I could get along, and I got to move before the week’s up.”
She shook her head again and laughed out loud. “You picked up more than an accent in Rhode Island, picked up a few Yankee ways, didn’t you?”
“No more than I need to get by.” I dropped my head, looked up at her from under my eyelids, giving her my country-honey drawl. “Shit, Mama, I’m just a good old girl, don’t want no trouble a’tall. Easy to get along with, easy to get for that matter, and peaceable by nature.”
“Uh huh.”
“Uh huh,” I repeated back to her.
Just like that, we were friends. Anna treated me like an ambassador from a foreign nation. Baby-dyke-politicos, she named us, after I started going to all the meetings at the Women’s Center. I was twenty-four and had been dating women for more than seven years, long enough to resent being labeled a baby dyke, but Anna had been out for almost twenty years and joked that she’d had her first orgasm while wearing her Girl Scout uniform. I liked her better than any other women in the building: liked her slow, stoned drawl; her sharp, witty glances; and her invariably good-natured acid remarks when people started talking about the “women’s revolution.” Most of all I liked her stories. She’d been going to Panama City where there was a real gay bar with a drag show since she’d come to Tallahassee as a freshman in 1963. There wasn’t a dyke in town she didn’t know and no legendary piece of gossip she hadn’t already heard, or been the subject of. Ten years ago, she’d been arrested with two dozen others out in front of the blackened ruins of the town’s short-lived gay bar. All their names had been printed in the paper, and she’d lost her teaching fellowship in the English department.
“That was enough politics for me. I’ve had the longest graduate school career in history as a result. You know this is the first year they’ve let me teach again?” She offered me a brownie with one hand, a joint with the other. “And still, every time somebody opens a gay bar in this town, some local firebombs it. It’s got to where it’s easier around here for a faggot to get a liquor license than fire insurance.”
“There’s that pool hall over on College.”
“Yeah, after one o’clock in the morning, and then only if you’re real discreet, and real careful, and real young. I an’t none of that, and I prefer Panama City myself. ’Course, you probably like those sweaty girls in tank tops that go in there and pose under those sling lamps, sneaking whiskey in their soda bottles when it an’t their turn to play.”
“You have been there.”
“Hell, I’ve been everywhere in this town. I could tell you stories would keep you awake nights. Like the name of the boy who firebombed the last two gay bars, and exactly what year his daddy got appointed sheriff.