Free Macho Sluts by Patrick Califia Page B

put every ounce of her bitterness and pride into it, and when she sneered, “The men don’t know what the little girls understand,” we howled with one voice.
    They never did encores. After they disappeared from the stage, a lot of leftover energy would be flying around. One post-concert crowd was treated to a knife fight in the best tradition of West Side Story . (Nobody got hurt. The two combatants wound up leaving the woman they had been fighting over to fend for herself, while they went home with each other.) When members of The Bitch were confronted about this in the feminist press and asked to comment, they all disclaimed responsibility and shuffled and apologized—all of them, that is, except Jessie. She scowled and announced that it was time for women to reclaim their violence. “I just wish the stupid cunts would cut up some rapist instead of each other.” Then she offered the interviewer a line of coke.
    The journalist, Amazon Birdsong, was not mollified. She could afford to buy her own coke (pharmaceutical, an ounce at a time). She had wealthy parents who loved Te Kanawa, had never heard of Chuck Berry, collected first editions of D.H. Lawrence, but never went near an adult bookstore. After the stinging review she published (“Pornographic Attitudes Infiltrate Wimmin’s Music”), The Bitch didn’t get any gigs for six months. They were rescued by a women’s karate school on the brink of bankruptcy. The benefit concert they did there salvaged their foundering reputation and gave the bar owners an excuse to start booking them again.
    Incidentally, the school had huge, blown-up photos of Jessie and other band members in the locker room. I wondered how many women took self-defense classes there just so they could shimmy out of their jeans under Jessie’s sardonic smile. I had been considering getting into Tae Kwon Do myself.
    There was a stir at the head of the stairs. I looked over crossly, unwilling to interrupt my introspection. Then I saw who was causing the commotion. She had come back. It was Jessie.
    I had an immediate physical reaction to her presence: my clit jumped. Then it started throbbing in time with my heartbeat. As I watched her speak to acquaintances here and there, moving on before a greeting could turn into a conversation, I began to shake a little—an erotic attack of fear.
    The party picked up. There was a last-minute run on the beer and apple juice. More couples started dancing. Jessie found her spot on the stair railing and leaned there, not moving. I ran my eyes up and down the slim, well-muscled lines of her body, teasing myself with estimates of her strength, wondering what she would feel like pressed down against me, her arms wrapped around me.
    She was taller than me by six or seven inches. Her dark hair was clipped short and neat. She was wearing a black velvet jacket that showed off her shoulders and lean build to perfection. A long, white scarf was knotted around her throat. Whenever she moved, the fringes floated behind her. The nerve of the woman, to come on so tailored and dykey, with that trailing length of silk to remind you she was very much a lady.
    A roly-poly woman with long, cornsilk hair and a cowboy hat bustled over to offer a beer. Jessie thanked her and then turned three-quarters away. Her helpful fan talked to her shoulder for about five minutes before she got the idea and faded out.
    The nerve of the woman!
    A crowd began to spiral around her. She stood at its center, blowing smoke into the faces pushed too close to hers, nodding absently at whatever was said, but drawing so hard on her cigarette that it was obvious she took more pleasure from it than from her present company. All her movements were graceful and confident to the point of arrogance. I find arrogance irresistible.
    Perched in my window, I wondered about Jessie. A friend of mine told me that her last lover left her because “she was tired of being pushed