Memories: Put the Lime in the Coconut

She walked in the classroom cool and slow. It was five minutes into the class and the room was quiet except for the professor, who was speaking. She had a saunter that made me weak at the knees, or would have had I been standing. She walked around to an empty chair. Her motorcycle helmet hit the table with a disruptive clunk. She sat down with her legs spread and her arms draped over the arms of the chair, taking up as much space as her small frame possibly could.

“Spike,” the professor said, “Do you have anything to add to the conversation?”

Spike lifted her arms and made a gesture with her hands, palms down, pointing outwards, as if she was dancing. “She said, ‘Doctor!'”

It was so incongruous, no one could help laughing. The professor smiled indulgently, in a way that professors only smile at a favored student. She must be smart, I thought. I was intrigued. So, apparently, was a pretty blond-haired, blue-eyed woman who was also in the class.

It was not long before I saw them walking around campus hand in hand with one another, and for a time, I forgot about Spike. But the pretty blond-haired blue-eyed woman would soon go back to her boyfriend. She committed the unspeakable. She dumped Spike for a man.

My first boyfriend wore a black leather jacket, rode a motorcycle and played guitar. My first girlfriend wore a black leather jacket, rode a motorcycle and played guitar. You could say I have a type.

As luck would have it, she was friends with some of my friends. One evening, she offered to make a snack run. I immediately volunteered to go with her. We climbed into the gold Dodge Dart she was always working on. The space between us was wide and there was no suave way to span the gap, so I reached over in the least clumsy way possible and put my hand on her knee.

She glanced at me with surprise. “You? I would have never guessed. Well, then come a little closer.”

She wore her hair short and a cowlick caused it to kick up in the front making her resemble the bird she kept, the bird that kept trying to peck at me as I lay on her bed the next morning, as she sat at the foot of the bed playing her guitar. It had been such a revelation the night before to peel off all those loose-fitting clothes to find such a beautiful body underneath.

I’d had some minimal experience with women before, but this was the first open relationship I had with a woman who was out of the closet. She had been out since high school, perhaps longer. Smart, funny, confident, she was something of the big dyke on campus. She had a high libido. Politically active, she explained to me how concepts like butch and femme were an anathema to all right thinking lesbians. Butch and femme, she told me, were a sad imitation of heterosexual gender roles and should have no place in a lesbian relationship. Then she asked me to wear a skirt with no underpants so I would be sexually available to her whenever she wanted.

When no one was looking, she’d push me up against a wall and put her hand up my skirt. She’d finger me until my breath grew short and my face flushed. This was a little game she liked to play.