For You, The Stars
Chapter Thirteen: Installment 2
Just the week before I’d been to a party at Bettie’s house in Berkeley. A bunch of people from Climex were there as well as some of her other punky friends. This was just before I’d closed the deal on the car, so I took BART to the east bay and went looking for her address. I didn’t know my way around Berkeley very well at all at after hiking about six blocks I got to a big intersection, Alcatraz and Adeline, that should have been where I was heading, but there was no address that matched the number I was looking for. It occurred to me that maybe I’d been walking west the whole time when I should have been walking east.
There was an all night liquor store open, which was good because I had been planning to bring a bottle of tequila to the party and I hadn’t managed to pick one up yet. I went in and bought a fifth of José Cuervo (at the time I had no idea what good tequila was), and the used the payphone to call Bettie. The phone rang and rang and I almost gave up when someone picked up. It was one of the proofreaders, Elena, a Russian woman about my age. I didn’t know her name. I told her where I was and said I was lost and tried to get a fix on where I should have been. “You’re way off,” she said. “Sit tight and I’ll come and get you.” I remembered that Elena rode a Harley.
I stood around under the streetlight on the corner for what must have been nearly fifteen minutes till I heard a motorcycle roaring up. She was wearing leather from head to toe. She turned and came to a rest at the curb and said, “Get on.” I stuffed the bag and bottle into the side pocket of my jeans jacket and straddled the broad seat behind her.
“Have you ever ridden a motorcycle before?” she asked me. I said no. “Well put your arms around my waist and remember to lean into the curves. Neither of us wore a helmet. I wrapped my arms around her and she gunned the motor. It was exhilarating, riding through the night like that. The leaning part was easy, just like on a bicycle but faster. “You’re doing great,” she yelled over the sound of the engine. We got to Bettie’s in no time. She opened the front door of the little faux-Spanish bungalow and I heard loud music coming from inside. Elena went in first and I followed her in, brandishing the bottle. As I held it in the air people cheered.
“Would you consider yourself blond,” one of the other proofreaders asked me out of nowhere. “I don’t know, I said. Dirty blond, maybe? Can a guy be a dirty blond? Why?”
“We were just arguing about what color your hair is.” That was kind of weird, that they were talking about me. I was flattered to be, even briefly, the center of attention.
Bettie came out of her little kitchen and said hi. “There’s a keg in there,” she said, gesturing behind her, “and booze over here,” pointing to a card table set up in front of her mantle. I said, “do you have any shot glasses?” and she said, “I think so,” and went back to the kitchen, returning a minute later with with one small glass.
I cranked the top off the bottle of tequila, breaking the seal, and poured a shot. I held it up to her and said “first shot’s on you.” She downed it in one gulp and a little cheer went up from the people nearby who were watching. Then I poured myself a shot and drank it off again in one draft. Then I refilled the little shot glass and handed it to Elena. After that I went around the room making everybody do shots and doing a few more myself.
Before too long I had caught up with the standing velocity of the party and I felt like I was in the swing of things. In the kitchen this guy named Herman Hebert was holding forth about politics or some damn thing. Hebert was the head of production. All the proofreaders and the typesetters reported to him. He was in his thirties, so he was probably the oldest guy there. He wore a skinny new wave tie and red candy striped dress shirt that unfortunately emphasized his paunch. I noticed he was following Bettie with his eyes. He was about my height, so Bettie really towered over him. I remember overhearing Herman saying something out of line about Kim Ross once when she walked by his office. I gathered he had crushes on a lot of the proofreaders.
One time, one of the few guy proofreaders popped into Herman’s office at lunch time and said “Basketball?” in the sense of asking him if he wanted to play a pick up game in the parking lot outside the office where a single backstop was set up. He said it so it sounded more like “bass key ball” and Herman for some reason thought he had said “Skibone?” He said, “Is that my new nickname?” and got all excited at the thought that somebody had made up a cool street sounding nickname for him, as if maybe he’d been waiting all his life for someone to give him a nickname. The guy said no, of course, he was just talking about basketball and what the hell was Herman going on about? but Hebert wouldn’t let it go. He got the sound of that name stuck in his mind and actually spent some time after that trying to get us to call him Skibone but nobody would.
I realized that Herman has Kim cornered near the fridge so I went over to get myself a beer chaser and maneuvered her away from him. He finally wandered off, following in Bettie’s wake and Kim thanked me for rescuing her. We started talking about music. I was pumping her for more cool rare bands to recommend. She said she’d make me another tape with Soul Asylum on one side and the Replacements on the other and asked me if I had liked the song “White Elephant” she had stuck as filler on the end of a Lyle Lovett mix. We fell into an easy converation, rambling from topic to topic as the party continued to swirl around us.
At some point we started making out. I use that term advisedly. We were kissing, yes, but it was like high school. We were standing in the corner of the kitchen really going at it, not really caring who else was around. For the time being I wasn’t thinking at all about Cecilia, let along Maura, who I knew was showing up soon, or Giselle, or anyone else.
At some point we realized that the party was nearly over and mostly everyone else had left. We wandered into the living room and saw that Herman was lingering, as if in hopes of being invited to crash there by Bettie. “I don’t know if I should drive,” he said, in the most pathetically obvious way possible. “Well, you’re not staying here,” said Bettie matter-of-factly, dashing his hope with cruel nonchalance. I realized it was probably too late to go home on BART and Kim said she would drive me home. Herman stared at us as we said goodnight to Bettie and she asked us to take him with us. We made sure he left when we did and suggested he sleep off his buzz in his car before heading home. “I’m not really that drunk,” he said, winking at us, and we headed off in the other direction.
Kim drove me to her place in Berkeley. “You can crash here tonight if you want,” she said. “I should probably sleep on the couch,” I said. By now I had remembered Cecilia and while I was not above fooling around with someone and I knew our deal allowed that, I wasn’t sure sleeping with someone from work was such a good idea, assuming that Kim was offering and I think she was, and I also didn’t want to make a major change, at least not yet, in my relationship status.
So I kissed Kim goodnight and she got me a blanket and I fell asleep pretty fast on her couch. She had a roommate, but I didn’t see her since she had her own bedroom. I had to get up in the middle of night for a wicked piss and I imagined Kim in her bed, maybe touching herself. I was intrigued by her thin little body but I resisted the urge to knock on her door. I woke again early and let myself out, finding my way to the North Berkeley BART and getting home before ten, nursing a painful bad-tequila hangover in the bright fog-burn sun.
All this went through my mind as I lay there with Maura, holding her and kissing her gently, not “making out” like teenagers but kissing slowly as if learning each other’s minds through our mouths, touching her teeth gently with my tongue, or turning my head so she would notice that I wanted her to press her lips lightly against my earlopes. I was not in a hurry to mount her. Instead I reached down between her legs, feeling her warms and the moist dampness she was producing.
Ever so carefully I touched her, slowly exploring what she liked and what she did not, building momentum until in the dark as my mind drifted I imagined myself playing a musical instrument, some sort of cello or harp, relying on a kind of intuition, muscle memory, the sensations under my hands, the tempo of her breathing, until finally she came bucking her hips and convulsing slightly, breathing heavily but trying not to cry out loud, since by then we had heard my roommates return to the house, banging doors and talking loudly in the nearby living room.
I held her as the energy in her body subsided and kissed her neck. Her mouth found mine and she thanked me wordlessly. Then with her strong arms she rolled me over onto my back and in the halflight pouring in through the window behind my head I watched her slide down, my comforter on her back, and then take me into her mouth with confidence. Her expert ministrations invited me to relax entirely. Muscles I didn’t know I had unclenched for the first time in years.
I felt a sort of sensation beyond the obvious and powerful pleasure eminating from my genitals, a sense of being taken care of, not the clinical notion of “being serviced” but more a frank acceptance of a gift freely offered and a clear understanding, almost a cosmic insight, that this was the kind of moment I had been hoping for all my life.