"So...come here often?" He seems self-assured, and I know that he must be very proud of himself for seeing the sexual or aesthetic worth in me that most probably do not. Although he is almost certainly attracted to something about me, he undoubtedly feels as if he is also doing me something of a service by approaching me, by giving me the chance to be sexy, feminine, delicate, or otherwise which I so sorely long for. It is true, of course, that I have quite a short haircut for a woman, and that I would look awkward in a dress, but haven't long hair and gender roles pretty much gone out the window in the last decade or so anyway? Letting the line of smoke between us rise out of the way, I smile, showing him my porcelain vamp teeth. My, what fascination these fake fangs have drawn from people whose interest would otherwise not have progressed beyond casuality. Females, especially, seem to be under the impression that they are an immediate and sincere testimony of my considerable worth as a lover. Well, who am I to argue?

"More often, I suppose, than you pick someone up with that line." This boy -- boy being less a sexist condescension than a legitimate characterization -- is confused by my mixed messages, and understandably so; I imagine that he is rarely turned down. As he scoots off of the barstool next to me and disappears into this crowd or that on the pretense that he has just seen someone he knows, I feel nothing for him. There was an era when I felt pity for some of the college students or similar examples of healthy American youth who had occasion to wander into this rathole from time to time. Well, perhaps pity is too strong a word. I empathized. I felt their discomfort at discovering that this was not, in fact, another trendy, impersonal place where every man is Prince Charming after a few drinks. I even tried to talk to a few of them, and perhaps that's what led first to a mild distate for and later to complete disinterest in the whole business of communicating with the world. Either way, the lot of them are of absolutely no concern to me at this point, so I put my cigarette out and get up. It has been a long night. Most nights are long for me, but this one... And it's only 2:30. So many ghosts following me; for days I have tried to deal with them, and it finally occurs that perhaps my only hope is flight. Flight to where, I cannot fathom, but somewhere. Anywhere. The club is so dark these days, and dull. I can see nothing of its former glory in the cotton cob-webbed ceilings or even in what remains of the old crowd, myself included. There is a newness about it all that is deeply depressing. Some people find newness to be uplifting, even joyous, but I could never convince myself that it was anything other than an ending to whatever had come before. Endings are invariably heart-breaking. I, myself, am a walking ghost, constantly pursued by longer-dead entities who resent my own proximity to the world of the living.

Blood. My god, the blood. The first time we made love she made me bite her neck.

"It's the most intimate thing you'll ever feel," she said, and she was right. I bit her neck and sucked her blood; she was ecstatic. I always knew she was insane, but somehow I think she still took me with her. I wanted to be as elegant, as apart as she was, but nearly all of her virtues, including those two, were a direct result of her anti-grip on reality. Not that that at all detracted from her worth... it just made her nearly impossible to equal. Thus, I was her lover and not her rival. As I should have been. Everyone knew she was a genius, although, as time goes on, I find it more and more difficult to grasp, let alone describe just what it was about her that demonstrated her elevation of mind. I believed in it at the time, of course, and I am fairly certain that I believe in it still, however cloudy the details may become, but it's so hard to pass these things on. Time has always been my enemy. I nearly gave up painting at twelve, when I realized that I wasn't the prodigy I had hoped to become, or at least realized that no one had yet acknowledged me as such, which was no less important. It's a good thing I didn't. I never would have met my Isabelle.

When I moved out of my parents' house I was seventeen. Having bid my first real relationship adieu the previous summer, I realized one day that there was nothing keeping me in the suburbs. I was hardly going to school anyway, and once I tired of the emotional bondage which had so excited me in the beginning, I left my then current lover and hit the city. The City, oh that magical place of the perfectal dreams -- though I never hesistated to acknowledge its seediness, its infamy for fear of succumbing to that scourge of the teenage intellectual's existence, idealism -- where I might seek my fortune. Urbia spelled sex to me, and I felt fortunate to have so little to lose. I could proceed utterly without caution along the trail of that most potent of all aphrodisiacs, the female scent. Brazen as I was, I had so little to offer most of the women I would have liked to go after that I quickly realized I would need an actual job and an actual residence in order to take care of my needs. Living on the streets? Sleeping under flattened-out cardboard boxes, passing out drunk inside of an acquaintance's airplane locker, opening packages of toothbrushes, toothpaste, soap, and deodorant in grocery store restrooms? All of these things I could manage and did manage for six months of city dwelling before it became clear that it was no way to win the body of the gorgeous, sophisticated, intelligent women I so desired. Normally, as an eighteen year old high school drop-out I would have had very little chance with them at all, regardless of employment status and lifestyle, but I was lucky. A wave of these angelic, ideal creatures came up through the dyke scene in the '80s who had recently divorced their husbands and were coming to terms with their newly-realized orientations. Most of them were reluctant to make any sort of commitment to anyone, and so I had the opportunity with several of them to be but one of many lovers. Although I now have trouble imagining the mind of a person who has no desire to become emotionally committed to the people she fucks, I was certainly very good at it. I repressed nothing, yet I truly felt no need to be around them in any other context. That is not to say that I did not -adore- every woman I made love to around that time, but perhaps I felt that the very essence of their virtue depended upon them being either in the process of foreplay, in bed with someone, or lying limp and spent, afterglowing.

It was December 14, 1983, and I was drunk. But seven weeks since I'd struck out on my own, I had neither job nor permanent residence and I was cold. I suppose it was sheer luck that, although the average temperature in my home town on any given day had been a fairly high, fairly consistent number even in winter, my wardrobe had consisted of mainly long-sleeved, high insulation garments. I had yet to acquire a large enough amount of money all at once to actually buy any new clothes, so I sat on the cold sidewalk, my head spinning, with my ass turning to ice beneath me and my body shivering inside a thick cotton shirt and a heavy leather jacket. As I hugged my knees and wondered whether my overall body temperature would rise if I sacrificed the extra warmth I was able to capture by curling up so tightly for the relief of not having to freeze my backside by resting on what might as well have been an ice block, she passed me in the dark. She passed me trembling, stumbling a little, but still with incredible grace. I wobbled to my feet without tearing my gaze from her in spite of sloshing, blurring eyeballs. I followed her shakily for about a block, tripping several times because I refused to look away from her elegant, finely-toned shoulder blades, and feeling as if I were in a dream. Maybe I am dreaming, I thought. Could I really still be awake after all I'd had to drink? Anyway, if it was a dream I didn't care. It occurred to me briefly that I should care -- as I stared after her gorgeous shoulders, her perfect hips draped in the seamless, flowing fabric of her evening gown -- because if I had fallen asleep between the bar and home I would wake up without my jacket, maybe without any clothes at all. Even the idea that I might freeze to death while some other bum spent the night in a $100 Harley jacket, though, could not take my mind off of the incredible figure which now stumbled, then stopped, and finally sat, achingly, upon a bus stop bench. Cautiously I approached her, very aware of the night, of the lack of illumination from which our particular stretch of sidewalk suffered, and tried quickly to decided whether I should take the steps necessary to at first disguise my gender. Of course it would take great effort and quite a bit of forethought to really pass for a boy all the way, as I actually did have breasts and fairly delicate facial features. This is not to say, of course, that I had anything like large breasts, but there is a definite difference between being flat and having very small breasts, especially when one is naked. I eventually decided to let this woman begin to trust me, perhaps to develop an on-the-fly affection for me before she realized, thinking it her own mistake rather than my deceit, that I was female.

"Hello, there," I called quietly, as if I were trying to coax a street kitten into my cupped hands. Hesitant to acknowledge me too eagerly, she turned so that I appeared in her peripheral vision while appearing otherwise oblivious. When I came near enough to the opposite end of the bench, I put a hand down to steady myself. Her image danced before my eyes, and the headlights of a passing car momentarily blinded me. With one forearm shielding my face I ventured,

"Are you.." here I had to steady myself after swimming through an unexpected -- unexpected, yeah, right -- wave of dizziness, "all right?"

"You don't look so hot yourself." Her voice was shocking.