Nothing but sex. That’s what I expected.

Men, women. Cats, dogs.

Lizards. I learned somewhere, during my years of academic delinquency, that some lizards are parthenogenetic, meaning they are all female and thus the male of the species is obsolete. They might be the ultimate feminists, except that during mating season one female lizard assumes the role of the male for purposes of mutual stimulation. Thus, what might have been an example of ultimate feminism becomes, instead, an example of ultimate feminist capitulation.

But I am not a feminist. These issues should not concern me. I only remember because at the time, in ninth grade—maybe tenth?—the concept struck me as being cool.

In college, though, I expected less kissy kissy in the hallway and more in the way of actual fornication. That was the whole reason I went. My stated major of English poetry aside, I was there for what I’d experienced only once, and then badly. I wanted more on this fantastic act that was the topic of books, poems, films. Basically it kept the human animal in drive rather than in park. It was the major preoccupation of my own, meager existence.

As describes the Wife of Bath:

For she was wilde and yong, and he was old

And deemed himself ben lyk a cokwold.

That was me, so wilde, so yong, so utterly unsuccessful. I was yong and yet I was the cokwold.

My yong classmates moved through their own wondrously glorious lives in a seeming morass of carnal licentiousness. In my mind it slipped from their lips during ordinary conversation. When it appeared they spoke of grades or the insipidness of the instructor, I sensed instead recent memories of hot bodies and sheets. I looked in their eyes and searched the deep black that was their pupils, the holes in their skull, direct route to the brain. Keeper of dreams.

In the depth I couldn’t reach they knew what I was desperate to take into myself.

So I went to parties, random parties in the student ghetto where one backyard bash merged into the next. Drinking cheap beer from plastic cups I felt the need to pee, frequently. But also my natural tendency to wallflower bowed to the greater will of alcohol, and soon I found accommodations on a sofa, recently reclaimed from the streets, still clutching the aromas of mildew and leaves. There a boy leaned into my body and whispered in my ear while rubbing my leg with his hand. The cold of an early fall frost vanished in the embrace of animal heat all around me, and I laughed. I laughed at everything, at everyone, at the empty cup in my hand that someone refilled with vodka. At the dog that wandered the room, wagging its tail and scarfing crumbs from the floor, surveying all us humans with its big doggy giggly smile.

To be a dog, I thought, to exist in endless joy.

The boy stood and I followed him with my fingers in his grip. The alternating fullness and length of his palm and the distal digits pressed my flesh. As we climbed the steps I reached out and brushed the texture of the peeling paper on the wall. Like passing my hand through fields of wheat, I saw a hand and stalks and a yellow blinding sun. Polka-dot skirt billowed in the wind.

He opened the door and it showed a student room with a bed. Plastic crates on the floor were piled with books, boxes, miscellaneous kruscht.

Then his hand was gone from mine and I watched him pass before me. Entering the room, pulling off his shirt.

I followed and closed the door he’d left open.

He looked at me, shirtless with ruffled hair. His real skin that was pink and near. He gestured for me to approach and I obeyed. I pushed my face into this chest and breathed his smell, which told me more than his name, his major, what his mom sent him for Christmas, all of which I was content not to know. Because all I wanted was this feeling of warm skin. All I required, at this moment, was the knowledge that our closeness would be soon. That his big blue eyes would stare into mine during the act and that I would be part of what even lizards wanted, despite being a race of supposedly liberated females. The thing they could not achieve because they were physically cold blooded, hugging each other with tiny refrigerated arms. Webbing in their toes. Cool but not.

The grown boy in my arms, his hair was brown. It was short but curly. He had a scar near his stomach, toward his hip. It was a small scar. Maybe from appendicitis. But because it was his scar, and because most people never saw it, I loved it. I touched it with my fingers and he shivered.

We took each other in a bed that belonged to him, or maybe to someone else. If he lived here, in this house, I didn’t know and I didn’t care. The bed had been already unmade when we arrived. The sheets had clouds. The pillowcases had suns. I closed my eyes and lingered in the thrusts. Over and again my fingers traveled to the scar, catching it through the motion, feeling nearer his soul because I touched this old element of pain. His moment of exposure. It was a story I’d never learn but that he likely never forgot.

And then he left and that didn’t matter, either. I climbed out the window and found purchase on the roof of the porch which was slick with frost, sparkling white and hard from the moon.

                                                                                         ***

Days came and went. I carried my books, dropped my books, doodled dragons in the margins of my notes. Raised my eyes to see more men, more women. Class and class. Lecture and chats.

Shakespeare whispered in my endless circle thoughts.

Chiron: Thou hast undone our mother.

Aaron: Villain, I have done thy mother.

More parties where my mother never knew, even when she was yong. Another dog. Another vodka. Another sofa with stripes, checks, paisley pink and yellow coffee-stained brown. Heat. Loll. Hunger of man for woman, woman for man. Person for person. Sex in the silence, in the empty, in the bedroom with the thermostat turned to eighty-five.

No words. No thanks. No speech of recrimination.

Just sweat, then cold of winter. Mornings in another man’s robe.

It was happening, what I’d wanted. Now sore when I walked. Chafed from too much, still wanting more.

Love. It was love like the lizards who couldn’t speak. Who rolled their eyes up and down and sideways.

On the phone to my parents I said school was good. Your money, I said, it was well spent. I spoke these words to spare them thoughts of Lear. So I wouldn’t be a lizard to them, too.

How sharper than the serpent’s tooth it is

To have a thankless child!

Then another night with a man. Watching him undress and seeing the tattoo that might have been a tapestry. Knowing, suddenly, that this was more than a tattoo. It was Irezumi—the Japanese Mt. Olympus of tattoos.

Fabled but, until now, unknown to me in the flesh.

The man, he caught my look and smiled. I swayed in the drug of anticipation, asking myself if it was normal, to do this so often. To do it and never speak.

But now the tattoo, it consumed my thoughts. The process of being inked, I’d heard it was addictive. To complete a project took weeks, months, I wasn’t sure. To make canvas in deep skin. Pain that became pleasure. Impossible to resist and back for more. In the swoon I asked myself if I should get a tattoo. If it would help. Me.

More ink. Less fornication with strangers.

Irezumi man, slits for eyes and no body fat, he took my face and kissed me. The dragon on his arm seemed to climb from his skin to mine. It cuffed my wrists and held me in its scaly embrace and I was kissing, holding. Whining. Lying in bed and doing what I did now every day, every night. Another man. Another room. Another hour of companion-driven solitude. The Irezumi on his back like a second lover. Watching it undulate in the mirror above the mattress. Coming just because it was so beautiful.

Neglecting my studies. No longer calling my parents. Becoming sharp as the tooth of a serpent.

Needing tattoos. Needing men with tattoos. Lying topless on my stomach the whirr of an ink gun filled my ears. I wanted dragons. Big, wide, fire-red eyes. Red like the blood that pooled on my skin.

My new life: again and again I sat in a chair by the door to the parlor. Cold air froze my hair since the door closed with a gap. The parlor walls were papered with drawings of tattoos. I stood and touched them, thinking back to the night when I’d climbed the stairs and brushed my fingers on the paper peeling wall. When I’d thought there’d be happiness and I’d have love like the happiness dog. Before the lizards came and something got lost.

There was a knock. I turned. Tattoo man was ready for me.

Later that week, when the artwork was finished and I could lie on my back and not wince, I stayed the night with him in the back room where he lived. In a bed that was hard, with a man who was hard. Thrusts that were hard. No scars but the ink of tattoos. No moment of exposure except my own.

When he was done he let me go and I left the parlor, having taken everything there was to take. I never went back.

Instead I stood in the street, or on the sidewalk. Under awnings in the rain I smoked one cigarette and then the next. Angry dragons wrapped my wrists. I dropped my own, paltry version of fire to the ground and mashed it with my foot.

I was a poor excuse for a fire-breathing lizard.

Lear again:

Come not between the dragon and his wrath.

Did I have wrath? I wasn’t sure. Did I have anything?

Only men. I watched them watching me.

Fifty dollars, I said. Yes, that’s all. No, don’t talk.

Wait, do you have a tattoo? Can I see it?

Afterward the man sits on the edge of a dirty mattress.

Lizards, I say, breaking my own no-speech rule as he pulls on his pants. Lizards don’t have men. They’re capitulating feminists.

The man looks at me. He says, I didn’t pay to talk about lizards. He leaves cash on the dresser.

But lizards are my life. And because I was never a feminist to start with, I feel like I capitulate even more.          

I capitulate to the need, the need for men when really I have no need. Except that I do. Except that I require the feeling, the penetration. The look in their eyes, whatever it is, when they do it. I need it over and over and over again. Bodies that are larger than mine. Bodies so near it hurts my brain. If I had money I would pay the men rather than the other way. Because really, they do me a service. They keep me alive.

Whatever I wanted in college, nothing but sex, I have the sex and not the college. Which is how I wanted it in the first place, really. Because I have nothing and everything. Agony and joy.

Emptiness that’s filled. Routinely. My wallet and my body, both filled in tandem.

I think I have a problem but I’m not sure. I can’t tell that, either. Everything is unclear but the one need, like parthenogenetic lizards.

Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting,

Lizard’s leg, and howlet’s wing—

Blind to all things except that other man, watching me from down the street. So I’ll put out my cigarette. Tell him it’s fifty dollars.

                                                                                      THE END