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an excerpt from
Star of Persia: A Post-Queer Love Story by Bianca James
a Project: QueerLit finalist
THE PHONEBOOTH
"Hello?"
"Did I wake you up?"
"Naw. I'm watching re-runs of that terrible Pioneer reality show on PBS. It's great;
these ladies are totally having a catfight over a bag of cornmeal. I wish you were here to see it."
"You want to go get some breakfast with me?"
"It's One A.M. Aren't you supposed to be getting a piece of ass from a hot goth
chick right now?"
"That didn't pan out so well. I'm standing out in front of the Seven Eleven on
Telegraph Avenue drinking a Vanilla Coke Slurpee-"
"In this freezing weather? And you're probably wearing something slutty and
revealing, too. Hang on a minute, I'll be right over."
THE FIRST DAY OF HIGH SCHOOL
Martin had been dreading the first day of his senior year of high school all summer long. He programmed his CD player alarm clock to play David Bowie's "Big Brother" at seven a.m. sharp. He shifted his head on the pillow as sad horns heralded the call to drudgery:
Don't talk of dust and roses.
Or should we powder our noses?
Don't live for last years capers-
Martin sat up naked in bed, and lit his first cigarette of the morning. He sat there
in the dark, listening to Bowie as he smoked, picked his silk kimono (purchased at a temple flea market in Kyoto) off the floor and went over to his dressing table to get ready. He lit the sacred heart candle he'd bought for a dollar at the Mexican grocery store and started brushing his hair, freshly dyed black with bright streaks of crimson Manic Panic. Martin melted the tip of an eyeliner pencil in the candle flame before rimming his green-brown eyes with a thin line of black.
He'd carefully laid out his clothes the night before- black pants, black boots, a white men's dress shirt, and the sapphire blue velvet jacket that Cherie had given him as a back to school present, with a red paper rose tucked in the buttonhole. He slipped the eyeliner pencil into the jacket's secret inner pocket alongside a fresh pack of clove cigarettes. He slipped on the mother of pearl rosary his Irish Catholic grandmother had given him on his last trip to Boston, and spritzed himself with Demeter Gin and Tonic cologne to give himself the appropriate air of disaffected decadence.
Martin picked up his weathered German leather book bag, stocked with fresh notebooks and pens from Japan Town, and slipped his I-Pod into his pocket, the white plastic surface deliciously smooth against his fingertips. He'd made a special play list for the first day of school, full of sad songs by Leonard Cohen, Siouxsie Sioux, Nick Cave, Elliot Smith and PJ Harvey. If he needed to get some distance from high school ennui, he could slip on his silver headphones, close his eyes and pretend that the music was the soundtrack of his life.
IN THE KITCHEN
"Good Morning, Mom," Martin said, kissing D'arcy's cheek in the kitchen.
"Do you really need to wear make-up to the first day of school?" his step-mom
Rosemary groused, handed him cup of coffee.
"You're wearing more make-up than I am," Martin replied innocently, his
mascared eyes peeping over the rim of his coffee mug. D'arcy grinned on the sidelines. Martin and Rosemary bickered on an almost constant basis, but Rosemary was the one who always made sure he got the school supplies he needed and his college applications turned in on time.
Martin grabbed a bagel and wedged it in his mouth like an anaconda preparing to
devour a rabbit and headed for the door.
"Come back here and sit at the table to eat that!" Rosemary called after him.
"No time!" he yelled around the edges of the bagel, slamming the door after himself. He got his cherry red Schwinn cruiser out of the garage and started pedaling with one hand keeping balance while using the other to shove the bagel into his mouth. Martin thought of all the kids who bragged about getting cars for graduation and felt pity for them. Martin could think of only two things he liked better than riding his bike:
1. Drinking tea with his best friend/unrequited crush Cherie
2. Masturbating in the shower while thinking about Cherie
MUSIC CAN BE BETTER THAN CHOCOLATE OR SEX
The day Cherie met Martin, he was wearing a tangerine colored tee shirt
emblazoned with the legend MUSIC CAN BE BETTER THAN CHOCOLATE OR SEX in bold black letters. That was the first thing she'd noticed about him. She mistook him for a girl at first, with his lip-gloss and pink sunglasses. He came into the shop to try on an electric blue angora sweater she'd had hanging in the window. The sweater slid down his skinny hairless chest like butter melting on hot toast.
Cherie was caught staring when Martin removed his sunglasses and skewered
Cherie with eyes the color of cocktail olives.
"How much is this? There's no price tag on it."
"I'll trade it for your tee-shirt."
Martin bit his lip, an endearing quirk. "I bought that shirt in Japan. It's sort of
special to me."
"Well, that sweater used to belong to Jayne Mansfield," Cherie had replied in a
deadpan tone.
Martin's eyes widened with innocent surprise. "Are you serious?"
"I'll give it to you for a donation of fifteen dollars."
"Can I trade something else for it?"
"Depends on what it is."
Martin, foraged in the pocket of his black pants. His hand emerged clutching a
heart-shaped Altoids tin that had been decorated with red glitter and a glued-on picture of Louise Brookes.
He slowly opened the box to reveal its precious contents. The sweet mingled
fragrances of clove cigarettes and sticky hash wafted towards Cherie's eager nose.
"You've got yourself a deal," she said, licking her lips. "What did you say your
name was?"
"It's Martin," he said, extending a hand tipped in silver-varnished fingernails.
Cherie drew the shop's curtains and hung the "Go Away" sign in the door. Martin
left a few hours later wearing the blue angora sweater.
SEVEN A.M.
The beat-up clock radio went off at seven a.m., blaring Doobie Brothers.
"Aaaaaaaaaaah!" Cherie screamed along with "Listen to the Music." Cherie always set the radio to the cheesy classic rock station to force her out of bed. Cherie extended a feeler from her warm nest of blankets to whack the radio into submission. She rolled out of bed, refusing to succumb to the temptation of the snooze button, and stood under the hot rain of the shower, gradually regaining consciousness. Wiping the steam from the mirror, she tweezed a few stray eyebrows and ran a handful of butch wax through her choppy blonde buzz cut.
"Booya," she proclaimed proudly, flexing her butch biceps for the benefit of the mirror. She had started working out again and it was paying off.
Cherie stared at her face in the mirror and felt sinking disappointment. At the age of twenty-three she had the face of a handsome fifteen-year-old boy. This was the face that got her modeling gigs as a child, but now she thinks maybe she ought to pick some fights for the sake of a few scars or a broken nose to add some character to its bland Aryan landscape. She practiced scowling in the mirror, hoping it would make her look tougher, or at least older.
Cheri pulled on the same outfit she wore everyday: wife beater (not enough tits to justify ace bandages), white tee-shirt, cuffed blue jeans, black leather belt and motorcycle boots, and headed over to Lalo's place for breakfast.
PAPA LEGBA'S PANADERIA
It was a five-minute walk from O'Hare's Bric-A-Brac Shop to Papa Legba's
Panaderia.
"Buenos Dias, Senor Gutierrez," Cherie said in broken high school Spanish,
ditching her cigarette as she entered the bakery. "Where's my motherfucking coffee?"
"Why do you always have to use such filthy language in my place of business,
Cherie?" Lalo replied, pouring java into a Styrofoam cup. Cherie knew better than to mess with Lalo, but sometimes she couldn't resist.
"I come here every motherfucking morning for breakfast, that's why," she sassed
back. "I've earned the privilege."
Lorena "Lalo" Gutierrez is a true gentleman, six feet and 315 pounds of
commanding Latina bulldagger. Cherie has never seen her looking anything less than GQ sharp. Even at eight o'clock in the morning Lalo was wearing a starched white shirt, perfectly pressed trousers, shoes polished and hair slicked into a shiny black pompadour. Below her rolled shirtsleeves, Lalo's golden forearms were muscular from kneading bread dough every morning for twenty years.
"Gimme one of those rolls with the brown frosting on it, and one of them cup cake
looking things with the sprinkles," Cherie said, pointing at the glass counter full of pan dulce.
"Get it your own damn self," Lalo told her, picking up a newspaper. "You've
earned the privilege."
Cherie sat down at a white plastic table to eat her breakfast.
Lalo glanced up from the newspaper. "How are you feeling lately?"
"You know," Cherie said. "Same as always. Nothing ever really changes."
"Things are always changing," Lalo replied. "Maybe you're just standing still."
"Maybe," Cherie replied. "So what, I like where I'm at." Lalo was a high priestess of the Santeria tradition and had an irritating habit of tossing out random philosophical tidbits. Cherie decided to change the subject. "I met someone interesting yesterday."
"Oh yeah?"
"A boy. About the same age Terry was when I met her."
"Do you still miss Terry?"
"No."
"You haven't had a girlfriend since she left."
"I've had sex with girls who weren't Terry."
"You told me you never slept with Terry."
Cherie snorted. "And you believed me?" Cherie sighed and shrugged her
shoulders. "I said I didn't miss her, not that I've recovered from that mess."
"That was three years ago."
"I know that, okay? Let's not talk about Terry anymore."
"Suit yourself."
"I gotta get to the library," Cherie said, standing up and pulling a few crumpled
bills from her jeans pocket. "How much do I owe you for that?"
"It's on me today."
"Suit yourself," she replied, shoving the money back in her pocket. "See ya
tomorrow." The bakery door jangled after her.
"Same time as always," Lalo sighed.
TERRY
Cherie had gone to Papa Legba's Panderia for breakfast almost every morning for the past four years. There had been only one occasion when Lalo hadn't been there to greet her.
"Hey old man!" Cherie had called teasingly into the kitchen. "Where's my
coffee?"
A teenage girl came out from the back of the shop. Her kohl-ringed brown eyes
were blood shot, her chapped lips twisted into a sullen pout. Her hair was bleached the color of straw with long dark roots, pulled back into messy pigtails. She was wearing a black tank top and a padlocked chain necklace fastened around her throat. Her exposed golden skin was tattooed with snakes, roses, and writhing naked women.
The girl had poured coffee into a paper cup in silence, and shoved it towards
Cherie.
"Hey, sorry," Cherie said, dumbfounded. "Where's Lalo at?"
"She's visiting a friend," the girl replied, sounding disinterested.
Cherie put a dollar on the counter, and left without saying anything more. She'd
forgotten to put milk in her coffee and it tasted bitter to her, but she drank it anyway, thinking about the beautiful girl with the wounded eyes.
TONY DARK
Terry got kicked out of high school at age fifteen for picking fights with boys she had crushes on and sending them home with black eyes and bloody noses.
It wasn't too much later that she was kicking Tony Dark's ass on the floor of any club in Portland where his band Near Dark hadn't been banned. Tony had found of a copy of Terry's comic Burnside Baby at Reading Frenzy and wrote her a fan letter asking her to draw show fliers for his band. Tony was seven years older than Terry, a minor celebrity around town. Terry had seen never his band play, but she'd seen him at parties and show, each time with a different beautiful girl on his arm.
Women couldn't resist Tony. It didn't matter that his nose was a little too big for his face, his skin was chalky white with occasional acne, his dyed-black hair was always unwashed, but his eyes were dark and intense, and he had a voice like broken glass dipped in honey. He hunched over the microphone while he sang, whispering and screaming cryptic lyrics about death and sexual obsession. He wore ripped white men's shirts stained with blood and paint, the top buttons undone to flaunt the bluebirds tattooed on his chest, and the rosaries he always wore even though he was Jewish. Terry didn't trust him. There were too many girls in love with Tony already. Terry preferred the slightly nerdy guys who stood in the shadow of guys like Tony, praying girls would talk to them. She agreed to draw the fliers in exchange for guest list privileges and free beer, and swore she would never fall for Tony like those other fools did.
TONY D. SMELLS LIKE ASS
Terry made it her personal mission to crush Tony's inflated ego through calculated public humiliation. If he tried to flirt with her, she'd grab some random guy and start making out with him. She made up mean gossip about Tony having a small dick and falling asleep while having sex with some girl, scrawled "Tony D. Smells Like Ass" on the bathroom wall of every club in town. The way she saw it, it was only fair. There were too many girls who wanted to sleep with Tony; it was her duty to discourage a few of them.
Terry's constant antagonism was equally frustrating to the clueless Tony. He had no idea why she acted the way she did, but she fascinated him in a way that the other girls hadn't. He was determined to win her over, though he wasn't sure why he wanted to.
One night they had wound up alone together after a house show, getting drunk together in Tony's bedroom after everyone else had left.
Terry was making fun of the way of Tony had sung that night. "You look like such a fucking tool onstage tonight, Tony. Especially when you dedicated that song to
William S. Burroughs. I nearly puked all over myself."
"What the fuck, Terry?" Tony slurred drunkenly. "Why do you hang around here if
you hate me so much? What have I ever done to fuck with you, huh?"
"Why do I need a reason for hating you, Tony? There's just as many girls who
love you for no apparent reason."
Tony shook his head. "You're one fucked up girl. Come here," he grabbed her
arm. She scooted away from him on the bed. "Come on, baby-" he said.
"No way," Terry said. "If you think because I'm drunk-"
Tony smiled. "What the fuck is wrong here, Terry? Why don't you just tell me?"
"Nothing's wrong. Fuck, I should go." Terry stood up, and her head was spinning,
she felt like she was going to fall over. She sat down again. "Okay, you asked for it," she said. "I know what you do, Tony. You trick girls into thinking they're the only one you care about, and then you fuck them, and once you've fucked them you stop caring, because you want someone new to hypnotize. And there's always someone new waiting for you. It's disgusting. Do you honestly like yourself? Can you honestly delude yourself into thinking I'd want to sleep with that sort of man?"
Tony blinked. Terry's words stung. "I don't do that-"
"Yes you do, Tony. I watch you do it every night."
"You know Terry, if you don't like it, why do you stick around? Why do you even
care?"
"Beats me. If you want me to leave, I'll leave. I hate your band anyway, it sucks."
With that proclamation Terry ran into the bathroom and puked her guts out into the toilet. Tony held her head and gave her a glass of water and a toothbrush afterwards. When she'd finished, she stood up, and buried her face in Tony's chest. He put his arms around her warily. "I hate you, Tony, I hate you," She said, crying.
"Why do you hate me, Terry?" He asked gently.
"I hate you because I like you, Tony. But I can't like you, because you'll just use
me up and throw me out like you did to everyone else. I hate you because I can't love you."
"Terry, about those other girls," Tony said gently, "Terry, they're bigger users
than I am. Do you think they'd fuck me if I was just plain old Anthony Weiner the retail worker?"
Terry stopped crying. "You're last name is Weiner?" She cackled, with an evil
gleam in her eye.
"Look, you're the only person I've told that to, okay. That must mean I trust you
right?"
"You shouldn't trust me with that sort of information, Anthony Weiner. You know
that I'm mean and gossipy."
"Whatever, tell people if you want. I already know the other sorts of things you tell
people about me. What I mean is that I could never tell any of those other girls my real name, because they don't want that part of me. They want to fuck rock stars. They want to feed off that energy by fucking me, so I let them. I'm no better than them, but I'm certainly no worse."
QUEEN OF THE SCENE
They didn't fuck that night, but they did make out, and that was only after Tony
promised he'd tell "yo' mama" jokes onstage at their next gig. Terry expected their fling be over the next day, a drunken mistake. When Tony made it clear he was still interested, Terry wasn't quite sure what she wanted to do.
She started sleeping over in Tony's room every night, but she wouldn't let him touch her below the waist. She was still a virgin, a fact that made Tony want her even more. She came over every night, made out with him until he couldn't stand it anymore, and then go home. If he could make it a month without sex, without fucking around with other girls, then Terry would be his. At the end of the month Terry took him to the VD clinic to get tested. Afterwards they went to the drug store where Terry picked out a box of condoms and Tony paid for them.
Tony fell for Terry because she was the only girl he was incapable of impressing.
He wanted her in a way he had never wanted another girl, simply because she would not give herself to him freely, because she didn't worship him as an infallible deity. He'd been oblivious to the intensity of her hidden desire until the first night they made love. Tony had never made love before, only fucked around. Terry made him go slow. They touched each other for an hour before Terry let Tony enter her.
Terry had fallen for Tony, though she would never admit it to anyone. When they were alone, Tony talked to Terry like she was the only girl on earth, the sexiest thing alive. He held her face so hard when they kissed that she just sort of collapsed into him, losing herself in his rock-star cock-magic. It was unlike herself. She laid awake at night thinking about him, his evil smile burned into her mind when she masturbated.
Tony proposed three months into their relationship using a pawnshop diamond ring. Terry left home for good and moved into Tony's squat, they slept in the same bed every night so she could know he was being faithful. She managed the band's publicity, printing up fliers she'd designed with crow quill pens and India ink, and riding around town on her bike to paste them up around the city. She began apprenticing at a tattoo shop, and working at a coffee shop part time, and would meet up with Tony at Food Not Bombs every night for dinner. At the Near Dark shows, Terry was recognized as Tony's girl, reigning from the merchandise table selling records with her breasts bulging from her trademark vintage slips and corsets. She wore Tony's silvery rosary beads around her neck, stacks of Indian bracelets jangling on her tattooed arms, engagement ring glinting on her finger. The air around Terry sparkled with beauty and love, as though she were a Hindu goddess descended to earth. All the boys had crushes on her, bartenders always slipped her free drinks. She'd risen to the top of the scene in a matter of months and it felt good.
HEROIN
Things changed once the band went on tour, in the towns where nobody had heard of the band, in the clubs where nobody bought stickers or danced to Tony's songs. Los Angeles was the first time Tony had shot smack. They were staying at the mansion belonging to this rich old fucker who ran a record label. She had got in a fight with Tony afterwards, told him she would leave him if he did it again. He told her he was only trying it to see what he was giving up by deciding not to do it, which seemed like a lame excuse to Terry. He didn't keep up his end of the bargain. He went from trying it once, to once in a while, to everyday. Terry was torn between staying with the man she loved, now a junkie, or going back to her controlling Mother.
The decision was made for her, when the cops showed up at a show and arrested her for no apparent reason. Her mom had told them her daughter had become a junkie and a whore, and tried to have her stuck in a home. Lalo was kind enough to intervene. Lalo's bakery was the first sane place Terry had found to live. She helped out at the bakery and accepted Lalo's curfews and restrictions without complaining. She accepted the discipline in stride. It helped numb the pain, knowing she had no other choice.
THE COLLAGE
Cherie had fallen in love with Terry from the moment she first saw her in the bakery. She hadn't known who she was or where she'd come from, but she hadn't been able to stop thinking about her all day.
At that time, Cherie was still trying to figure out what to do with the cigar shop she had inherited from her deceased grandparents. The idea had come to her after she'd read a book about the gay British playwright, Joe Orton. Orton's lover had covered their apartment with collages of images he'd cut from library books. Cherie saw a photo of their place, and knew that was what she wanted to do with the space.
Cherie had started cutting scraps of paper from magazines and newspapers and saving them in a box. Every day she'd work pasting them to the walls for a few hours until the fumes from the rubber cement made her feel sick. She'd leave the doors of the shop wide open for ventilation. Her goal was to finish the project within six months then open a shop of her own.
She had been standing on a ladder, pasting a picture of an ocelot to the ceiling, when the feeling hit her. She felt her before she saw her. That sensation of being watched, her skin crawling under scrutiny, that was Terry. Standing in the door of
O'Hares, just watching with her big, wounded brown saucer eyes. When Cherie turned to look back, she didn't budge.
"What are you doing?" she had asked.
"I'm making a collage."
"Can I help you?"
Cherie hesitated a moment before responding.
"This has kind of been a pet project of mine."
Terry turned to leave.
"But on second thought, I'd love to have someone to help...."
Up until that point, Cherie had thought of the collage as her personal process of transforming the shop into something of her own, but when Terry asked, she couldn't bring herself to say no, for more reasons than one.
Terry arrived the next day after she'd finished her shift at the bakery, clutching a manila envelope full of magazine clippings. Many were of imaginary-looking animals cut out of National Geographic and Smithsonian: monkeys with red faces, birds with glittering green wings. Tropical flowers. African Serengheti. Terry situated herself in the opposite corner from Cherie and set about creating her private paradise, never stopping to explain her personal vision.
While Cherie had been trying to cover as much surface area as quickly as possible with her collages, Terry's were of a smaller scale, detailed, intricate, surreal dreamscapes. A nude woman with long red hair reclined on a bed of sand from which lush flowers bloomed, while a golden snail crept across her breast. A leopard with blue human eyes and a menacing white grin stared down from the ceiling. Hypnotic seashells spiraled from pieces of smaller images.
Cherie and Terry didn't talk much while they worked, but listened to music instead. Terry would bring over her favorite CDs: Tony's band "Near Dark," Murder City Devils, NWA, all angry music. Cherie was embarrassed when Terry came by and caught her listening to an old Adam Ant tape, but Terry shook her hips and sang along in a way that let Cherie know that she really did have a sense of humor.
CURFEW
Terry seemed like a caged animal to Cherie. Lalo kept her on a tight leash. She had to be home for dinner every night at six and wasn't allowed to go out after dark. She had to take her Paxil every morning when she woke up. She was not allowed to drink, smoke or swear, or go on dates with boys.
Nineteen year old Cherie was only two years older than Terry and relished her newfound freedom. She once asked Terry if it bothered her that Lalo kept such a tight grip on her life.
"I don't mind," she said, "because she keeps me from fucking myself up. She
understands what happened with Tony. My mom was a psycho but Lalo's alright. She's sane. She keeps me in line. She wants to protect me from myself."
Cherie didn't know much about Terry's past, but she could figure out a lot from
the scars and tattoos that decorated her bare brown arms. She had the "Near Dark" band logo tattooed on the swell of her right breast. Cherie was jealous of whoever earned the privilege of having his insignia indelibly inked onto such a marvelous piece of flesh belonging to a crazy, beautiful girl.
No matter how bad her crush was, Cherie was forced to frustratedly accepted that it was unlikely that she would be able to pursue a relationship with Terry. Lalo's rules, Tony's memory, Terry's heterosexuality, these were the things that held Cherie back. Terry was Cherie's muse, a beautiful goddess to be worshipped from afar. After six months of steady work together, they finished the collage a week before Terry's eighteenth birthday.
JUNKER
Cherie stuck the key in the ignition of her shit- brown 1987 Toyota Corolla, only
to hear the engine sputter a few seconds before dying completely. "Fuck!" she
screamed, slamming her hands on the steering wheel. It was only a twenty-minute walk over to the downtown Berkeley library from her shop on South Shattuck Avenue, and she could check out some books about car maintenance there. She had been planning to learn some basic mechanics for several years, but she'd put it off until her junker absolutely refused to start.
Cherie could have called a mechanic, but the thought of getting ripped off some grease monkey who thought they could play her for a fool because she had a pussy was more than she could stand. Cherie spent an hour poking around under the hood, her hands and undershirt stained with sweat and grease. She looked butch, but she didn't feel butch. The car still wouldn't start.
She heard the screech of a bicycle pulling up alongside her hoopty. It was
Martin, the kid who'd smoked her up the previous day. She slammed the car's hood in frustration as Martin dropped the kickstand on his cherry red Schwinn low-rider. He was wearing the fuzzy blue sweater, an inch of his smooth belly exposed above a pair of black jeans and flip flops, his toenails painted a dazzling blue to match the sweater. He looked like the missing member of Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
Cherie wiped her greasy hands on her jeans.
"What's wrong?" Martin asked.
Cherie was ashamed to admit that she had no idea what was wrong. "It won't
start," she said coolly, like this sort of thing happened to her everyday.
"Did you check the fuses?" Martin asked as though this sort of thing happened
to him everyday, too. He rummaged around in the glove box until he found a spare fuse, and gripped it between his metallic fingernails as if it were precious jewel.
"See, this starter fuse is broken. Pop this baby in, and it should work fine."
Cherie fit the key in the ignition, and the car started like nothing had ever gone
wrong.
"How did you know to do that?" she asked.
He shrugged. "I've been stealing cars since I was twelve years old," he replied
nonchalantly.
"Well I'll be damned. You got time to have a cup of tea with me?"
Martin followed Cherie into the shop, where she poured two tall glasses of mint ice tea from a pitcher in the refrigerator, and sat next to him on the couch.
"Can I ask you a favor?" Martin asked.
"Of course you can ask me a favor," Cherie replied. "You got that piece of crap
to start."
"Well," Martin stopped and started again. "I was wondering, you know, maybe if
you were hiring someone to do part time work or something...."
Cherie snorted. "Do you actually think this place makes enough money for me
to hire someone?"
Martin looked vaguely disappointed. "You wouldn't have to pay me, just sign a
paper. I want to graduate from high school a semester early, but I don't have enough credits because I studied abroad last year. But I can get an extra credit if I get a summer job."
"Hmmm.....I guess we could give it a shot. Just as long as you know this isn't a
real job or nothing."
They shook on it.
BENTO BOX
Martin showed up for his first day of work at noon, bearing a multi-tiered wooden lunch box he'd carried over on his bike. He opened the boxes to reveal breaded pork chops, steamed rice, and a tangy homemade cabbage salad. He passed Cherie a pair of wooden take-out chopsticks and they ate together on the couch.
"This is fabulous," Cherie moaned, who usually ate grilled cheese for lunch. "Did
you make this yourself?"
"Yup. When I lived in Kyoto, my step mom taught me how to cook."
"When did you live in Kyoto?"
"Just got back about six weeks ago."
"Are you serious?"
"It was just for a year. My dad is Japanese. He still lives there with his second wife, and their daughter. My mom thought it might be a good idea if I went and lived with him for a while. She noticed I was turning into a fruitcake and thought it might be a good idea if I had a male role model in my life, which is B.S. because I liked girls all along. I can't say my dad is really much of a role model, though."
"Did you mom ever remarry?"
"Yeah, she did. But Rosemary isn't really butch enough to be a good father
figure, I guess."
Cherie dropped her chopsticks mid-chew. "Rosemary?"
Martin smiled, he was used to this sort of reaction. "Martin has two mommies.
Three counting Sonoko, my step mom."
"Are you serious? That's so cool."
"In theory maybe. My family is so warped."
"Everyone.s family is warped."
"I guess so."
"What did you do in Japan?"
"They made me go to high school, but my Japanese is pretty lousy. I was born over there, but my parents split up when I was four, and I moved back to the states with my mom. I couldn't speak English very well when I started kindergarten, and I got made fun of all the time. Of course, by the time I went back I had forgotten all my Japanese. They stuck me in a regular high school, I had to wear a uniform and everything. I refused to cut my hair, though. I didn't understand anything in my classes, so I just sat in the back reading comic books. I did well in English, of course." Martin smiled.
"What does you dad do?"
"He's a sculptor, like my mom. They met in art school in Japan. Now he teaches
at Seika University in Kyoto. Our relationship is kind of weird. He's my dad, but I look so Caucasian compared to him, so nobody in Japan thinks we're related. I just felt like an exchange student living with them. I bonded the most with my step-mom Sonoko. She did everything she could to help me. She didn't speak a lick of English, so my Japanese got really good with her."
"What about your moms in America?"
"D'arcy, my bio-mom, teaches art at a private school at Walnut Creek. Rosemary is a second generation Filipina, she's therapist who counsels troubled youth
in Oakland."
"Wow. You're so young, and you've already had all these amazing experiences."
"Not really. What about you?"
"What about me? I'm 23 years old, and I still haven't gone to college. I grew up
in a boring town in Southern California. My grandpa died when I was eighteen, and left me this shop and some money. So far, that's all I've done with my life. Run this shop, read lots of books. I like to think I'm contributing to the community here, but that's probably a load of shit."
"I don't know what you're worried about, I think you have the perfect life."
Cherie smirked. "I'm glad somebody thinks that."
Bianca James is a writer, translator, and lady vagabond living in Kyoto, Japan. She is currently plotting her escape to San Francisco in order to perform drag and burlesque under the stage name "Tittycat Von Scandalpants." Her writings have appeared in various anthologies, magazines, and websites, including The Best of the Best Meat Erotica, Ultimate Lesbian Erotica 2005, and Larry Flynt's Barely Legal. She is currently revising her second novel Mono No Aware, set in post-modern queer Japan. Her hobbies include drinking tea and coffee, astrology, high faggotry, and the pursuit of scandal.
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