She Gave Me a Liberal Dose
I became a liberal when I met her.
She was sitting in the audience at the Tribeca Film Festival and I said to myself, she looks gay but I think she's straight and then when we finally met after opening night, her seat next to mine, I transformed from neoconservative to a liberal on the war in Iraq. This was because I wanted to get laid, it had been five years and politics aside, William F. Buckley is not going to get me an orgasm. Plus, I think it's interesting to transform my small world of predictable conservatism. You ever look at the Soviet immigrants with wool socks who attend those libertarian meetings? The chicks at the war rallies are much more fuckable.
Of course, my true thoughts are that I think we should let the world sink or swim, but since I believe that Saddam Hussein has tons of people ignited by his personality, and because the MF killed so many Kurds, it is imperative that we bomb the shit out of him. But you can't hope to say that and get a girlfriend. Most people find Che sexier than Mussolini.
Plus, lesbians with short hair at film festivals do not want to comprehend that you are particularly in love with them or the war. They like distance, heartache, a little game playing, some Internet exploration, and a few words about why you were not at last week's peace rally.
I mean, she is not politically correct 100%. She's a lawyer for Goddess' sake. That means she probably works for some prestigious law firm and eats her salad from Starbucks with a not-so-inexpensive vinaigrette. She's Starbucks socioeconomics. Between Tribeca Festival and walks through the Berkshires, she marches with her Jersey girlfriends to protest "Bush" in the White House. But she does so with a sense of humor, a smile, a little blink in the midst of the film's urine scenes where we are perplexed. We are perplexed because my mother is sitting on my left and she is on my right and how do I explain anonymous gay male sex to my mother and that's why she blinks at me. But the blinking which she does so well, beautiful 20-year-old eyelids, is no indication that we're going to hold hands. I can't even get the energy to put my hand on her knee while she's chewing on a brownie that she doesn't offer me.
"Do you like that scene?"
"It's brill." I reply.
"Brill?"
"You know, brilliant."
She hopes that I will comment negatively about Nicole Kidman's repetitive performance in the Lars von Trier movie.
She keeps pestering me about the upcoming march in Washington next Tuesday. She's this rare breed who sees movies and attends rallies. She also hates drama, which I find strange since war rallies comprise all the neuroses of all the pragmatists who don't act out emotionally until they're yelling how much they hate Bush.
"Well," I say, remembering that my subscription to National Review is supposed to run out next week, "I'm not sure I can make it, but my support is unconditional."
She seems disappointed. There are dykes in New York City who don't understand when you say that you are a Republican. They can envision Log Cabin Republican faygelahs living in new condominium complexes called "The West Village Island," indeed gay men can meander in that realm; but if you're female and not a big fan of Kate Millett, don't believe Kate is the female Socrates of a new generation and the older ones for that matter, then you are behind the times, not the New York Times, the Sapphic Times.
For years the politically correct lesbians have shunned me. They have considered me so self-involved that they think I am missing a link in an ideology that is about me. One former girlfriend left a message on my answering machine, "Why don't you try Buddhism instead of solipsism?"
Whereas I'm egocentric, she dates former men and present-tense women who are converting to me. She is that ripening between male and female. I might as well retire from dating because I'm not going to fit into her exponential zone of hormones. They just keep popping all over the page like last year's fireworks and here I am an antiquated cherry bomb, hoping she'll celebrate with me. She dates post- and pre-gender; she likes men-to-women or women-to-men who have become complex yet impassioned folks. It's all very discombobulating -- a Blade Runner scenario with the transgendered beings replacing the biological males and females rather than the replicants, as the year's most erotic.
She's so exquisite sitting there in her diminutive haircut and pleasing neck and luscious demeanor but she giggles during the film's perspicuous moments. She might be like David Carradine chasing Uma Thurman, she being the chaser of poor George Bush, a great man who just wants to capture terrorists and fry them. I find nothing so exhilarating as that. Tell that to the transverse police. Unless you are becoming a male-to-female version of Theodore Roosevelt (and he had liberal leanings too) you better forget about cute girls with long necks at peace rallies, I tell myself.
She is probably the most striking lesbian I have encountered who might like me. She is a riddle in God's path. And she enjoys my stories, smiles implicitly, likes the matter-of-fact aspect of moi. Likes my tranquil persona. Doesn't like my cellulite particles. What can we do to subsume 20 years and 20 pounds and a sweet personality? We are two sad ships eclipsing generations. Plus she's dating twenty people at once and trying to find herself although she's earnestly mature for her age.
Several of my friends, the ones who don't support war but could give two shits about the pro-PLO contingency she marches with (they'd rather be watching the war between the Yankees and Red Sox), tell me she likes me.
She gives me the same amount of attention during the film festival that she pays to Rosamund. Rosamund sits with us. We all giggle together about Hell in Bangladesh, a film where when people sneeze you hear the footsteps in the background. And although it is based on Ibsen's Cherry Orchard, they write "Inspired by Isben's Cheery Orchard." The melodrama is the antithesis of cheery, especially when the young boy dies by eating a snake by the lake. We expect maybe he's going to get eaten by a crocodile, but the snake in the lake, which serves as the Freudian Bangladeshi basis for the tragedy, is not what we had in mind.
"Edward Said would say the movie is a result of Western Imperialism," She says.
"Isn't he dead? Didn't Professor Said pass away last Tuesday?"
"Did he? I didn't know that."
She wears bright red lipstick and has black stockings and black shoes and looks like a totem pole from an Indian reservation.
She's also the lawyer of my bartender at the local gay bar. That's why I can't call her and get more material for this story, because bartenders are like gossip columnists -- they can tell the entire community I'm a stalker like the song, "I'm a girl stalker! I'm a girl stalker! Watching girls go by!"
We go to the local Starbucks, of course, because we both have the Barnes and Noble 10% discount cards. This is all done in my mind based on what my expensive cognitive therapist tells me. Cognitive Madame says, "ask her out for coffee." If she says yes or no it will nevertheless determine my fate, like sticking my feet in water; is it cold or hot, should I dip in?
Pragmatists are not romantics. I still have not invited her to coffee. Therefore she could not reject me.
However, today I asked her, in Survivor real time, "Will you be my lawyer?" Will you be my lawyer isn't exactly the most erotic question but it does leave the reader open up to possibilities.
It did not work. "Let's be friends." Whenever anyone posits the "f" word they don't allow the more vulgar "f" word.
When she refused to be my lawyer and instead chose to be my friend, I asked the people in my office, "If she wants to be my friend, does that mean she doesn't want to be my lawyer or that she doesn't want me to put my hand on her knee during the next screening?"
"Clearly," says Hank K, notorious for his confidence in his own viewpoints, "she wants to be friends." He is also good at alluding to the obvious.
To get yet another opinion in the office, I asked Sandra Pecquet who lives in the Bronx and has an itinerant brainpower for reducing all of us to mere consonants while she stretches along the ocean as a vowel - loud and in-sync with the water's rhythms. An empty consonant has no destiny but to follow the vowel.
"You gotta be friends before you can be enemas, I mean enemies. Enemies are sexy. But friendships evolve to fights so donut woooooooooooorry, you'll be fine."
I have changed my outer appearance, given in to my nonrealistic political view, and made a tentative promise to go to a peace rally, where lots of pro-PLO groups will marvel at my "I am a Zionist" button.
"Will you come with me to the peace rally?" She asks. "I really enjoy being friends with you."
"Is that all that this will come to?"
"I think you can surmise this friendship will transcend but not be sexual."
"You mean it would be like two feather pillows shaking hands?"
"Like two doves rubbing beaks."
With that I decide to renew my subscription to the National Review and think possibly about getting one to the American Spectator. George Bush Jr. has been soliciting assistance for his second term and I keep the fundraising campaign envelope conspicuously on my night table collecting dust.
True, the Soviet girls with woolen socks at the Young Republican meetings couldn't light a fire to my prima donna, but at least I won't have to attend mindless peace rallies with lobotomized academics who went the route of protest. In the end, I go to hear Mr. Norman Mailer speak at the 92nd Street Y and decide that it's okay to see people like Norman as the multifaceted creatures they are: half liberal, half reactionary.