Fucking Daphne by Daphne Gottlieb Read Free Book Online

weeks and hadn’t had a conversation with someone in what seemed like a long time.
    San Francisco was beautiful and full of fog as the ocean air drifted across the city. It was nearly summer. Tufts of clouds hung on the edges of the peaks like cotton caught on a drainpipe. The fog made the colors pop, and the rows of pink and green pastel houses lining the hills had the quality of a painting, like something too perfect to have happened by accident. Nothing felt real, and I wondered if I would stay once I found a job and made some money. I was running out of places to go. I’d been traveling for a long time and had forgotten why.

    I went to a poetry reading and I met a poet there, Daphne, with braided black hair, dyed in streaks of orange and pink. She was taller than me by four inches, with a broad, strong back, and her poems were the angry poems of a victim returning home with a box of matches and a can of lighter fluid. Her anger was ravenous and her words were mixed with sadness and self-loathing that ran straight to the bone. In her combat boots, motorcycle jacket, and tar-stained jeans, I thought she was beautiful.
    It was late on a Sunday, and there weren’t many people in the sharply lit windows of the buses and trolleys clattering down Market Street past the grocery and the taqueria. After the reading, we found our way to a punk rock bar with a solid jukebox full of Pixies and
Ramones, and several rows of hardwood tabletops and tall stools. There were five or six people bellied up at the rail, which is where we sat as well. The bar was not well lit, but there was enough light to see by.
    Daphne let me know she was living with her girlfriend and would be for a long time to come. She presented this to me defiantly, like it would change my mind about something. But I didn’t care. It had been six months since I’d left my fiancée. Daphne said she’d been an editor for a big magazine, but now she was unemployed and taking pills. I told her I had won a poetry slam back in Chicago. We were both dissatisfied with our current predicaments, not because they were bad, but because they were insulting. We were better than the world was willing to admit. I asked her if she wanted to add a shot to her beer and she said she did.
    After a few drinks I slid my hand between her legs. Not inside her jeans; outside, rubbing the denim seam with the bridge of my hand, forcing her zipper against her pelvis. “Oh, we’re doing that,” she said, and unzipped my pants and pulled my penis out and started stroking me beneath the bar. The bartender looked over at us once, then looked away. She gripped me tightly and pulled, letting her thumbnail scratch the tip of my penis. I thought she was going to tear my skin. I was so lonely, I laid my head on her cold leather shoulder.
    I thought, Yes, this is San Francisco. Before San Francisco I’d spent twelve hours in the shade of the post office on a park bench in Moab, Utah, unable to move. Before that I’d spent four months as a ski bum in the Rocky Mountains, those giant outdoor athletic parks where the men outnumber the women seven to one. My two-and-a-half-year
relationship had broken everything inside of me, and I was still running.
    I kept a hand on my drink. She yanked my belt buckle and unbuttoned my pants, forced her large hand down further, around my balls, and gave a quick, solid squeeze. I let out a cry and pressed my face into her hair, but nobody seemed to care. I zipped back up and left my empty glass as I followed her drunkenly, belt still undone, into the ladies’ room.
    What I loved the most about her was her size. She was proportionally Amazonian, thin but with enormous breasts, wide hips, and Marine shoulders. She was so much bigger than me, it was like she could fit me in her pocket.
    She forced me up against the back of the stall, her forearm on my neck, her hand inside my shirt, and she kissed me hard. “What do you