A piercing plays up, at the worst possible moment.
After I spent a couple of years tooling around with the soon-to-be labeled America’s failed youth, I abandoned the piers in New York’s West Village for a shot at a future. I moved out of the parent’s house in Queens and into Manhattan for college.
I stepped onto the roller coaster that is adulthood not quite yet eighteen. I didn’t want to buckle my safety belt; I wanted to feel the true effects of flying, though that feeling aborted abruptly the day a woman first called me a scumbag.
The first year of awakening as an adult, as a free being, as a muse with Manhattan as my playground (and a fake ID), I explored the fading grunge scene, and mélange of ladies that composed New York’s adult lesbian population.
When I found myself thrown into the world of adult lesbian dating, I was completely unprepared. I had spent the first couple of years out of the closet as any adolescent should, blindly throwing myself into the dating scene and saying yes until I learned how to say no. I dated bull dagger dykes and tiny femmes, Puerto Rican beauties and mistakenly men (and the closeted daughter of a Russian Mafia lord).
The first time I really fell in love in a mutually binding affair, I was just starting out on my own. She came into my life like the barrel of spontaneity and unpredictability that she is, cornering me against the brick façade outside what was then the Lesbian and Gay Community Services center in the West Village (in the days when bisexual and transgender were still considered the Santa Clauses and Easter Bunnies of the queer sphere), where we’d just finished our weekly young women’s group meeting. The street the center was on was a miracle survivor of industrialization and commercialization. Cobblestones lined the streets and the architecture matched the 20th century, with old brick buildings, no taller than five stories, running perpendicular to the pattern the stones made. Pedestrians rarely wandered down the street, thus making it an oasis of post sexuality meeting exploration, this time without a social-work-degree-carrying facilitator.
She cornered me, or at least I felt stuck. She walked with a wide gait and sported a tightly knotted black bandana and I felt my heart leap into my throat, though at the time it was because I thought I was about to get my ass kicked.
“My name’s Alison,” she said abruptly.
“I know” I replied. I had noticed her at the meetings, but only because I was upset that I had lost my individuality, that someone else shared my name and I could no longer distinguish whether I was the topic of conversation when listening in at bathroom or pier gossip.
“Will you go out with me sometime?” Something dropped out of her voice, perhaps the aggression, and I sensed a tone of sincerity and even insecurity.
“Sure, I guess.” I replied somewhat hesitantly.
Her smile removed any possibility that she was scheming on me and I quickly turned back and scurried off with my friends, slightly shocked, slightly exhilarated.
After several dates, which consisted mostly of going to the dive lesbian bar in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn with a group of gal pals, getting wasted and making out, something happened. I realized I really liked her.
In the coming weeks, we unofficially, officially started dating and our friends started referring to us as a couple. I don’t remember we ever had a conversation about it. We sort of just morphed from friendship and sloppy drunken sex to something resembling a semi-functional relationship.
I thought I was cool dating this older woman. I was struck by the fact that someone with a 9 to 5 would be interested in my young, precarious self. I was smart and not inexperienced, but certainly a bit of a punk. I spent a lot of time smoking pot and twirling my tongue ring around in my mouth, titillated by the sound of the click-click as the metal ball hit my upper row of teeth. I cared not that I was probably wearing away at the enamel; just that I was deemed a good kisser by the other lesbians in my pack.
I spent most of my free time at her apartment on Manhattan's East Side eating Chinese takeout, watching VH1 Behind the Music, and of course having hot lesbian sex. One night, not long after we had started dating, she led me by the hand into her bedroom. She lit the candles she always kept on her bureau for ambience and slipped out of her clothes and quickly into a slinky negligee. She was coming on to me.
The 12-year boy in me surfaced and I quickly pushed my jaw back up to meet my top row of teeth. Hot women had the tendency of making me drool slightly and take on a quasi-genetic defect look.
I gathered myself and approached her. We began to kiss and fondle and touch and tease and eventually I laid her down on the bed so I might go downtown. I loved putting my tongue ring to good use. I licked all down her legs and stomach and watched as she squirmed with delight, beckoning for me to lick that special spot that was now throbbing with pleasure. I took my time before reaching the destination and when I did, she moaned a deep, sensual roar and I moaned along with her, turned on by her being so turned on.
I licked and licked and then moved my tongue back and started dipping it inside of her, her moans gaining girth each time. I was fervent on pleasuring her and was so engrossed in the act that I didn't realize right away that my tongue ring had fallen off and was nowhere to be found. I halted the task at mouth for a split second and felt around in my mouth. No tongue ring. I backed up and sat up on the bed, searching below where my mouth had been. No tongue ring.
"Uh oh," I whispered.
"What's that?" she said.
"Nothing," I answered. No one wants to hear “uh oh” while engrossed in the act of lovemaking. There was, however, no way for me to get around this one without announcing the dilemma, which was consequently now hers as well.
"Do you think we could put the light on for a minute?" I asked tentatively.
"What happened?" she asked as she started to get up.
"No wait! Don't move!" I yelled and pushed her back down onto the bed.
She stayed lying down with a confused look on her face, while I frantically jumped up and ran for the light switch and then back to her crotch.
"Don't freak out, but I think I lost my tongue ring in…well…in there."
She returned my look of horror with matched disbelief and I settled in between her legs to search for the missing jewelry.
I combed around as gently as possible and finally saw a gleam of metal staring me in the eye from inside her depths. I pulled out the perpetrator and sighed with relief. The calm, though, was replaced with disappointment as I watched my lover pull her clothes back on and sit upright on the bed. The mood was most certainly dead. And I was red with humiliation. The cocky 18-year old was humbled.
Thankfully, I recovered enough to go on and date other women.