[Close Calls cover]

"Lightning Dances Over the Prarie Like Lust at a Nightclub"

By Anna Livia

A Story from Close Calls: New Lesbian Fiction

We were Rollerblading down Lombard Street, me and Spritz, my brilliant, beloved, drop-dead gorgeous g.f., zigzagging down that one in six gradient, bent as a drag queen's hairpin, when this great dark cloud appeared in the air. It spiraled toward us across the Victorian roof-tops of San Francisco, a black cone whirling in the sky, its point about twenty feet above the ground and descending rapidly. Absorbed in displaying the buff definition of our muscular quadriceps (me), or the tapering outline of our gazelle-like calves (Spritz), we failed to notice the speed of the ominous cloud and the fact that it was heading straight toward us. That is to say, I failed to notice the approach of the ominous cloud because I was too busy gazing at Spritz as she turned back toward me, and thinking how sweet her knees were -- little girl knees, bare and vulnerable and likely to need a Band-Aid, a contrast to her otherwise elegant femme frame. Spritz was however staring past me, having been warned of something untoward by the sound, which seemed to double in intensity every second, of a rushing wind of unnatural force.

"Oh my God," she said, "Run, Jiffy. It's a tornado."

We don't have tornadoes in San Francisco, we have earthquakes, God's warning against smugness to a people living on the edge. Tornadoes, as every American knows, are God's punishment to the Mid-West, a seasonal reminder that nowhere is isolated from the winds of change buffeting the land, and, incidentally, a third-class transportation system for adolescent faggots who need to leave the cornfields in a hurry and who have inexplicably missed the rainbow. What's more, Spritz and I were balanced on Rollerblades in the middle of Lombard Street from which the only exit is down. There is no going straight.

Well, Spritz, who is from the South (and has the accent to flaunt it) had some acquaintance with tornadoes. She jumped neatly from the road to the flower-beds -- lavender hydrangeas, if I remember right -- and threw herself into the shelter of a passing doorway. It was one of those moments when you remain icily still and the whole world rushes past you.

Only vaguely can I recall what happened next, but the colors faded into black and white, the sun wrapped itself prudishly in a thick wadding of cloud, and the terpsichorean contours of the city flattened out into a thousand miles of prairie, so vast, so unchanging, that as Shade was later to remark, "You'd swear the scenery had been pasted to the car windows."

The tornado dropped me in a strange flat, stubbly land, and though my house did not fall on the Wicked Witch of the Mid-West, I did tread on the toe of an accredited DMV driving examiner, armed with a clipboard, who was, incidentally, the biggest, baddest- looking bulldagger I had ever set eyes on. For, when one is tornadoed out of California and flung down in a cornfield the size of several of the smaller states, Rollerblades are no longer a totally efficient transportational system and one is drawn by some irresistible force, into secondhand car ownership.

The examiner did not wince, but stepped backwards and looked at me as though she would book me for violation of personal space. You know that look. It's the one you get if ever you presume to suggest that a butch companion read the instructions before starting on the easy-to-assemble kitchen table you have just bought from Scandinavian Design. When I say "butch," I do not mean to suggest that you are not yourself butch, I mean merely "butcher-than-thou," a much more hotly debatable category. For I myself am butch, but far too hooked on the written word ever to leave the printed page unread. I'm the one carefully following the road map, announcing authoritatively, "Okay, Gold's Gym will be on the next left, at the corner of the intersection," when everyone else has already spotted the sweating, muscular bodies through the car window.

"Miss Lube?" announces the driving examiner, eyeing her clipboard severely.

"It's Dr Lube, actually," I correct her. Since it was the achievement of this new status that caused the tornado to seek me out and abandon me here, the only job in my field in the whole of the contiguous United States, I feel I may as well insist on correct address. The driving examiner flicks another look in my direction and intimates that an unembellished "you" will be quite enough. We go out to the car I have just bought and set off along the road. It is nearly 7 pm, the last test of the day.

"Right here."

"Left at the next intersection."

"Stop."

"Now turn into that driveway."

I obey. I've been driving for years -- mostly Spritz's car -- and regard this test as a mere formality necessary to the procurance of dirt cheap car insurance.

"Ok," says the examiner, "Now pull into the side of the road." I do so. If ever woman was predestined for a role in life, the one now seated at my side was born to be a driving examiner.

"Pretend this is a hill," she continues, "and we are facing upward. Pretend the grass verge is a curb. How would you park?"

The road is completely flat. There is no hill, no hummock, no mound, no molehill for five hundred miles around. There are no curbs either, just a vista of grass verges and vast empty parking lots. Beware of towns where it's easy to park. I flashback involuntarily to my last helter skelter down Lombard with Spritz at my side.

"I guess I'm not in San Francisco any more."

My examiner neither smiles nor breaks into "Somewhere, over the rainbow," but waits, eyebrows at the ready.

"I would turn the wheel to the right and let the tires coast against the sidewalk," I parrot out grudgingly.

She notes something down on her clipboard and motions me to drive on. Soon we are back at the DMV office. As she gets out of the car, she turns to me, "You can take it again first thing in the morning if you want."

I stare at her.

"Why on earth would I want to do that? This has not been an unmitigated pleasure."

"Next time you might pass."

"You mean you failed me?"

"If you park on a hill, facing upward, and there's a curb at the side of the road, you don't curb the wheels, you turn them toward the road."

"You failed me for that? There is no hill in this town, there isn't even enough dirt to prop up a children's slide. Why does it matter what you do with the wheels against a non-existent curb on a fantasy hill?"

"We take our fantasies very seriously here in the Mid-West."

For a moment I wonder whether the whole tornado-cornfield episode will turn out to be a fantasy my girlfriend has kindly masterminded for me. But it's nowhere near my birthday and I am not enjoying myself.

The tough face has finally cracked, the eyes crinkle up and the corners of the mouth stretch out to the ears. My driving examiner roars with laughter, a noise that sounds like a garbage disposal swallowing plant gravel. Any moment she will slap one of our thighs (preferably her own) and offer me a Bud, then it's the potluck or the tailgate party. Probably the tailgate -- can't see my driving examiner at a potluck somehow.

"Mid-West humor!" she says, still grinning. "Now there's an oxymoron for you, Doctor."

I want to warn her that parody always contains an element of the Trojan horse, the amusing folly which turns around and bites you as soon as you allow it into the inner sanctum. And that self-parody is doubly perilous because of its propensity to backfire. But I am not sure she needs instruction and, with what little dignity I can muster, I stalk past her into the DMV office, have my photograph taken, lie about my weight, and leave ten minutes later the proud owner of a new Mid-Western driver's license in the name of "Jiffy Loob," a map of the state coming out of my left ear.

I have a car. I have a local license. I even have comprehensive automobile insurance. But there is no one to tell and nowhere to drive. I am tempted to go straight back to the ugly, semi-windowless apartment I have rented for a year and call Spritz, since she was spared by the tornado and remains in San Francisco living a normal life in our house in the Castro. I reflect, however, that she is, right at this moment, undoubtedly watching a re-run of that ER show in which the junkies chop off one of their arms to claim on automobile insurance. She might not be gracious about interruption.

Gothic is making a comeback, I don't know if you've noticed that. I myself am rather pleased by this development. I had feared that with the advent of therapy and scientific explanations for neurotic personal problems that gothic -- with its championing of the gruesome, the hidden and the grotesque -- would go to the wall, that the pent-up imaginations of overwrought, repressed, incestuous nobodies with quaint tongues and even quainter folkways would be smoothed flat by the ultra-modern glare of psychiatric understanding. I am relieved that ghoulish interest in blood and body parts is not altogether a thing of the past, though mostly contained and hygenicized in popular television and queer theory. The severed, twitching feet of the Wicked Witch of the West still beshadow our postmodern floodlights.

You must forgive me if I bore you. I am accustomed to saying these things to Spritz as we choose between blood sausage, pig's liver or lamb kidneys at the twenty-four hour Safeway on Market Street. Now that I have lost my constant companion I must make do with you, dear reader. As you with me.

What is there to do in small town America but shoot BB pellets at the Yield sign or drink Bud at the local bar? (I guess the local lesbians lie down on the nearest train tracks in deathless embrace.) Since the line in front of the nearest Yield sign is already six people deep, I pick the bar. As I drive past, six faces turn to stare at my buzzed, one inch red hair. The young man at the head of the line makes as if to shoot me with his index finger. I roll down the window -- two taps of a button, my car is as automated as you can get without turning into Commander Data.

"Don't get out much, do you?" I yell. I think I look like a cross between Annie Lennox and Laurie Anderson and I would like a little recognition.

"What do you mean? I'm from Romeoville, up by Chicago!"

"That's more than a hundred miles away," someone else offers. "Romeoville, imagine that. Why I bet you have a Dairy King and a Burger Queen and everything."

There is only one decent bar in this town and that's the Five Legged Prairie Dog. I park my car right outside the front door. My plates say "Lube 3." Can you believe there are two other Jiffy Lubes in the I-states? When the plates arrived in the mail I felt usurped.

Once inside the bar I go up to the counter and do what I have to do.

"I'll have a Bud."

The bartender is a small good-looking woman with a cheerfulness that seems to have infused even her short curly hair. She bends down, gets the beer, flicks it open and slides it over to me. I take out my wallet.

"It's paid for," she says cheerfully, nodding in the direction of a tableful of women seated at the back of the bar.

When did that happen? I'd only just walked in and I hadn't seen any meaningful looks pass between the back table and the bartender. I pick up the beer, raise it toward the women, and park myself at a table in a corner.

"Whassa matter?" someone yells, "Think we're a bunch of Typhoid Marys? Come on and join us."

I approach the back table. Someone kicks out a chair and I see someone I recognize.

"Well hello, Doctor Lube," says the now familiar voice of my megabutch driving examiner.

"Hi," I mumble. "Never did catch your name."

"Shade," she says. "That's Inspector Shade to you."

The others laugh and the bartender moves down to our end of the bar. "That's Dancy," says Shade, raising her right eyebrow toward the bartender.

"Pronounced 'Dancy'," someone else explains helpfully. "And I'm Jo-Allen Jones. And this is Jo-Allen Smith. And this is Tender Buttons."

Shade looks on as the rest of the introductions are made, eyebrows furrowed watchfully. I shake hands, sit down, and gulp my Bud. I have penetrated the inner sanctum of I-state dykedom only to find it guarded by a DMV driving examiner who confines all emotional display to her eyebrows, which are, admittedly, possessed of fierce powers of expression.

Right now Shade's eyebrows are forming pointed arcs over her battleship gray eyes.

"Two nil to me," she pronounces. "Just keeping you on your toes. You thought you'd sail through your driving test on account of we don't got no traffic out here in the mid-west."

I glance at her eyebrows but they have fallen silent.

"And you assumed us big-boned prairie gals would just flock around your San Francisco charm."

"You trying to tell me there's an initiation ceremony? I have to poach a salmon in the dishwasher? Carve salt and pepper shakers out of corn cobs?"

Shade grins. "Just letting you know there's a gate keeper. And I'm keeping score."

I buy a pitcher and we begin to get comfortable.

"Don't like the Mid-West much, huh?"

"I miss the ocean."

"California has ocean," Dancy agrees cheerfully.

"But we got sky," says Tender Buttons. "You lie out in the cornfields with your Bud by your side one of these late summer afternoons when the breeze makes the cornstalks sway above you and the shadows walk across your cheek, and you look up at the sky and see white clouds dotted about like girls in summer dresses."

"And then the air grows colder and the temperature drops and a noise rushes through the cornstalks, making the husks rattle, and the sky turns gray as slate and the clouds are dark green and lightning dances over the prairie like lust at a nightclub," says Jo-Allen Jones.

"And then the rain comes," says Jo-Allen Smith. "First just a few drops wetting your cheeks and forehead like a damp sponge passed over your face by a friend as you drive in the heat in a beat-up old truck with no air conditioning, then a torrent like sheet iron, and you're pinned to the ground with sweet fresh water in your mouth, your hair, your ears and in between your fingers."

"And you're wet, and the ground is wet, and the cornstalks are wet, and the rain has already passed over," says Dancy, "And in the sky there's a . . ."

"Giant rainbow?" I say. "I think I know that song."

"And now you're looking for a man with a hot-air balloon to send you back home again."

"That or a yellow brick road," I nod.

"What does that make us?" asks Shade with a dangerous tilt to her eyebrows. "The Munchkins?"

"Unless you turn out to be Glenda the Good Witch," I say brightly.

"Close your eyes, kick the heels of those bright red rollerblades three times and make a wish," orders Shade in a tone I recognize.

I look down. It's true. I'm still wearing my Rollerblades. No wonder it's been so easy for me to look down on the people here. Dutifully, I close my eyes, kick my heels (difficult to do in Rollerblades) and wish I was home. When I open my eyes again I am still in the bar, but the black and white tinge has gone, the colors are back and as I look at the faces of Shade and Dancy, Jo-Allen Smith, Jo- Allen Jones and Tender Buttons they begin to look like the friends I left behind in San Francisco, though my beloved Spritz is still nowhere to be seen.

"I know," says Shade, her face impassive as usual but her eyebrows rounded with concern, "it's the ache that tells you that you love her."

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