29. manipulating lesbians
Lisa sat at the kitchen table, gleaning her thoughts, preparing for
another written assault on society through sublime and coded
propaganda. An essay on why she liked to steal was put on the back
burner, deemed too dysfunctional for the general public to digest. It
dealt with shoplifters uniting to express concern about current
topics such as the globalization, workers rights, economic dividends,
genetic foods and the right to party, in order to motivate suppliers
to address social issues.
You are a lesbian, she wrote on a piece of paper. In this male
dominated society, it is you who has been robbed and raped, chewed up
and spat out, used and abused. She stomped her foot on the wooden
floor as she reread out loud what she had just written. It had all
the spontaneity, verve and wayward flavor of a woman in defiance, but
it was not exactly the point she wanted to address in today’s rant.
Sunlight beamed its way through the leaves of the liquid amber into
her recently acquired apartment. It was going to be another perfect
day. She went over her list of errands to be done, and decided
instead to sit in the kitchen and smoke another joint. She sighed in
contentment and went to fetch her accoutrements, sitting on her
nightstand in the bedroom. She noticed that someone had left a
sprinkler running and it was flooding her neighbor’s recently planted
flower garden. Although scantily dressed, she ran outside to turn it
off, singing a tune that she had recently made up in her spare time.
Lesbians.
We are a gift.
The overpopulation
is what we dish.
I am the new age.
I will set you on fire.
It takes some courage
to get much higher.
Get on the bus.
Don’t make a fuss.
Lesbians unite,
it’s time to fight.
She sang the lyrics to a folksy tune in a three-four beat perfect for
active yet unconscious actions like the one she was presently
undertaking. Appreciating the beautiful around her, she decided to
sit outside on her porch and watch the streets of sacramento pass
before her eyes.
“It’s nice to be alive.” She said, returning to the porch with a cup
of coffee and a joint in hand. She took a deep breath and sat down
carefully in a dilapidated leather armchair with springs poking
through in dangerous place. She lit her joint and watched a middle-
aged man dressed in white and a homeless person pushing a shopping
cart approaching from opposite directions. She nodded and smiled,
mouthing a hello to her fellow Grid inhabitants, who crossed paths in
front of her apartment.
I am a gift of the goddess and I am so lucky to live in Sacramento,
she thought. Mediterranean climate, a relaxed living standard,
pristine nature, close to the pacific ocean and sierra nevada
mountains, no earthquakes, mud slides or tornadoes. Good fresh food,
rivers and if one chooses to work for the state it is
guaranteed employment
for life. Paradise also had shopping malls, the culturally
disinterested public and a high mortality rate due to boredom. What
more could a person ask for? She paused for a moment. But paradise
for whom?
You know … continuing her mental monologue while watching the
homeless person, who had stopped moving and now stood in the
shade of a date palm, fiddling through his pockets.
There is so much shit around. The shit of mankind; the judists, the
islamists, the christians, the hindus, the buddhists and all their
respective fundamentalists, the conservatives, the radical right, the
military and the media. And smack in the middle, the ultra rich. I do
not believe the lies anymore. It’s time, they all learn how to clean
their own butt holes and stop defecating all over mother Earth. I am
so tired of their silly problems. Mother! she screamed in her mind,
looking up at the blue sky. I am so sorry, we women have not taught
our boys how to wipe their asses properly. She flicked her Bic and re-
lit the joint, taking a deep puff. Maybe someone should remind them
that they have a pussy too. A syllogism came to mind: If man makes
religion and religion makes war then man is war.
“Fuck the Patriarch.” She mouthed and let the smoke slowly exit her
lungs. She completely understood why her militant sisters boycotted
anything to do with the masculine side of society. She propped her
feet on the banister and concentrated on the homeless man slowly
approaching the porch.
She took another puff and drifted off into the past remembering how
her mother had instructed her in ass wiping, teaching the
fundamentals of wiping front to back in order to avoid infections.
Her mother had also passed along secret european remedies for
menstrual cramps and birth control. Lisa remembered her childhood in
glowing superlatives, and was content to be a product of a well-
adjusted family. It had given her the inner strength to carry on in a
masculine environment when her hormones took an alternate route in
her sexual development. Instead of swooning over boys and worrying
about dates to the Sock Hop, she found herself in love with the very
girls with whom she was showering. Luckily, girlhood intimacy kept
her basically satisfied until she was released from secondary
education and moved to a commune in the valley to study matriarchal
politics in its natural form.
She remembered her childhood before the accident as a picture of
innocence and joy: a beautiful bouncy little girl with brown curly
ringlets, playing with her grandfather. She remembered their long
walks where he was just as excited in discovering something new in
the park, around a corner or flying through the sky. She had learned
from her grandfather about respecting all things living and
understanding her place in the world growing around her.
The death of her grandfather had not really taken anyone by surprise.
He was old and had been sick for some time. The burial plot had
already been purchased, all that was left to do was to attend the
funeral and pay their last respects. The family had left Lisa in the
care of a neighbor they often called on for emergency baby-sitting
and piled into the station wagon. She reflected for a moment on how
her life would have been different, if she had attended her
grandfather’s funeral.
Lisa had not been keen on being dumped off at the Powers. Their house
smelt funny and there was plastic covering on all the furniture. The
plastic padded toilet seat in the bathroom frightened her and she
would go for hours without peeing if she could hold her bladder long
enough. If not, she would try to sneak away and pee in the garden.
At the time, the Powers were getting back to nature and trying their
hand at everything organic. Their latest attempt was the granola bar
which was passed out throughout the neighborhood whenever visits
where made. It was assumed that everyone liked these cookies, and
Lisa would be offered one as soon as she arrived. Cookie in hand,
Lisa would nibble on the pressed grain wafer to loosen its solid
structure and would spit it into the air-conditioning vent.
Unfortunately, this plan had to be stopped when the house began
reeking of the very product she was attempting to escape.
Candi, who was baby-sitting at the time, finished dying her hair red,
emerged from the bathroom and surprised Lisa, who had been left alone
to tend to her cookies. “Your parents are home now.” Little Lisa Pisa
soon to be a child cripple was told. “Hurry, hun. Go!”
She remembered bolting across the street, the Ford Galaxy 500 making
a direct hit, the flash of mortified expressions on the people’s
faces around her as she lay screaming, the fear on Candi’s face, the
cries and screams coming from every direction, the breast beating,
the broken english.
Mom and dad said that their daughter had changed after the accident.
Physically, she was mangled. Her right leg was completely bent out of
shape. The doctors were nice, constantly offering her Happy Pops but
that did not make the deformity any better. She was forced to undergo
years of surgical and physical therapy to straighten out the leg.
Candi’s guilt was intolerable and she atoned for it with weekly doses
of the dreaded granola bars. It was during these years of treatment
that she recognized her manipulative talents.
At physical therapy Lisa met a cousin who had been a victim of an
armed robbery at her father’s gas station. While selecting her
favorite soft drink, the assailants were emptying the till. As they
fled, the fired a few shots in the air to install fear and hinder
thoughts of pursuit. One of these shots shattered the plane glass of
the refrigerator compartment where Sally was standing. The tumbling
glass cut little Sally to bits, slicing tendons and piercing the
cornea of her left eye.
Lisa Pisa was happy to get a playmate at her physical therapy
classes, somebody to be her friend and confidante. Because of the
extreme nature of her injuries, Sally lived at the center that Lisa
only attended during the week. In Sally’s room, there were more toys
than Lisa had ever seen. It seemed that the entire room was stuffed
with large furry animals, children’s electrical gadgets, all sorts of
neat stuff in which little girls love to indulge. The toy that
interested Lisa the most was an interactive doll named Chatty Cathy.
But Sally, although mangled, had a mean streak and did not want Lisa
salivating on her Chatty Cathy.
Often Lisa would look on with envy as Sally would engage in lengthy
conversations with the talking doll which also functioned as a phone,
play station, and encyclopaedia.
Lisa first thought that she could get into the inner workings of that
doll through telepathy. She would spend hours wishing that the doll
would suddenly wake up and address her. She had seen this work on
television and concluded that it must be universal to all those who
wished really hard.
Yet, Chatty Cathy only became animated when it heard Sally’s voice.
Although Sally let Lisa sit in at their tea parties, she never got to
communicate with the doll directly. New and sublime ways needed to be
developed, ways in which the owner could save face by relinquishing
of her own will exactly what was demanded. In the weeks and months
that followed, Lisa refined her calculating social skills, learning a
lot from Sally’s selfish tendencies. Later, she applied those
politics with the aid of reverse psychology and appropriate flattery
and, within a few months, Lisa had the code to talk to Chatty Cathy
and could borrow toys indefinitely and salivate on them as much as
she wanted. Within a year, Lisa had healed Sally of her stingy ways.
“You see this coin?” The bum said methodically, pulling each word
from his mouth. As she had been sitting recollecting her early
childhood, she had watched the homeless man slowly make his way up
the concrete walkway to her porch. He then slowly searched through
his multitudes of pockets to find one shiny penny that he displayed
to Lisa between his overgrown and yellowed fingernails. “A woman gave
it to me. I ate it and it took me three days to pass.”
Lisa smiled. “Oh, really? Is that a fact?”
“Say, you wouldn’t happen to have another one for me, would you?”
Lisa returned from inside the house with a couple of quarters and a
note pad, and handed the homeless man the coins. “Don’t swallow ‘em.
Circulate ‘em in society, not internally.” He took the money and put
it into the pocket of his soiled jeans overalls.
“By the way, can I have the penny in exchange?”
The bum slowly cracked a smile from ear to ear, neatly displaying his
yellow stained teeth. A glint of mischief flickered in his eyes as he
slowly handed her the penny. “It’s a lucky penny now.”
“I bet it is. Thank-you.”
“You have a nice day.” He added and slowly moved away. Lisa sat down
on the steps of the victorian, listening to the bumps of the shopping
cart as it was pushed down the sidewalk. She took a sip of her coffee
and began to write.
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