Lora in Drag
2,900 words
by Gordon
Young
I started to
pal around with Lora in the city. A tough kid from Calgary, Lora told me a lot
about a dyke's life. She was sort of a throwback to the fifties in some ways. A
criminal who was burning out in her thirties, like a lot of ex-cons I had
known. Tired of causing trouble for herself, she honestly wanted to change, to
reform, and was trying to.
She took the
small room, the crappy room, in the house, the one meant for a small child. So
I slept on the top floor of the old house with three and sometimes four lesbian
women.
Lora and I
made friends pretty quickly, just hit it off as two people might. Sharing the
kitchen in the morning, she smoking cigarettes in her nightdress, me guzzling
the pot of black coffee it took to get me going after I woke up.
I got used
to the short, cropped dyke haircut chiseled into her jet black hair. Noticed
more her pretty, fine-boned and elegant face. She had a set of features I'd
always liked. Dark hair, Blue eyes, and fair white skin. At 32, she was lively,
energetic, and clever.
As I got to
know her better, and related more with her, I slipped into the habit of calling
her pet names, which I like to do with women friends.
I called her
doll, and honey, and sweetheart in the morning, and it baffled her and almost
made her cry sometimes, but she liked it.
So we
started going out together, downtown for a beer or splitting a cheap lunch in
Chinatown. She watched me eat for an hour once at the Burger King salad bar at
Cambie and Broadway. I had timed it about right, and from the booth at the back
of the fast-food place we watched the city come alive at night. Lights switching
on in giant buildings as the sun set and darkness came. The view changed to a
city nightscape as we sat there watching, Lora sipping her coffee happily from
the torn lip of the spill cover on the disposable cup.
Stuffed, I
left with her. She later told me she had never seen human being eat so much food at once. To me it was a good colon scrub that often put my guts to right
after weeks of drinking.
It started
to happen that, at least part of the time, people around us would slip into the
assumption that we were a straight couple together.
The first
time it happened was with a European waiter at an open-air pub downtown. We'd
both just gotten our welfare cheques and had decided to stop in at a bar while
running around doing things with the money: clothes, underwear, stuff like
that. We were both in the same tough
spot that way, and we found it was more fun to go through it together, to go
out and pick up the things we needed form Army and Navy, Value Village, the
places poor people go.
The waiter
came, took the order, left. "Why didn't that guy talk to me?" she
asked.
"Because
you're the lady."
"What
does that mean?"
"Oh,
it's just old-fashioned European good manners. The kind my grandmother brought
me up to have. The lady is assumed to be the social superior, that's why I wait
on you and serve you, deal with the waiter and so on. It's a way of honoring
the lady that's present, by always treating her as the social superior in any
given situation."
When the waiter
came back with the beers, we checked and that was right. He'd looked me over,
as smart waiters will, and spotted that I looked European, as indeed I was, and
that I might like things done the old-fashioned way, as indeed I do.
Lora had
never heard of it.
"She's
from Calgary." I said to the waiter. Lora reached across and playfully slapped me backhand on the chest.
"Always
kiddin' me that he's this big urban sophisticate, and I'm just this chick from
cowtown! Like, being from Vancouver
automatically makes him this big class act or something." She looked at
me, her big wide smile flashed, and she laughed with her high sweet musical
laugh, the laugh where she sang a rising scale of notes.
"Where
are you from?" I asked the waiter.
"Munich,"
he answered. "A real city, with class."
Then he
remembered his manners again, and asked, "What are you people to each
other...if I may ask?"
I glanced at
Lori, and fed him some baloney. "We live together." She nodded and
agreed. "Happy as clams."
"You...common-law
then?" he asked.
"No."
I said, after thinking a bit. Lora waited for my cue. "We've never made it
official, in fact I don't think we've been together long enough to qualify,
have we, dear?" I turned to Lori just as if we were a couple, used to
using each other for information.
"No. No
we haven't." She knew I was faking, was playing along. In fact, we'd only
met a couple of months before.
"We do
better financially this way, anyway, keeping our finances separate." Not
exactly lying, that was the way it was with welfare, but I let him think it
meant we were both working. Bullshit him some more.
So it went,
we sort of fell in to letting people make this mistake when we were out
together. I didn’t mind, I thought it made me look cool enough to have a pretty
sharp-looking girlfriend.
After a
while she decided she liked it, and asked what she could do to make it happen
more. I pointed out that the way she sat, usually, with an ankle across her
knee, was the more masculine way to sit. "If you can sit with your legs
crossed like this," and I showed her, crossing my thighs "this is the more feminine way
to sit, if you can be comfortable sitting like this..." She nodded. "...then
this is the way most women sit."
Her
dyke-standard black leather jacket was the first thing to go. Lori knew that
when she wore it she was more aggressive; all the times she had been in fights
was when she was wearing it. I actually liked the way she looked in it, very
James Dean, fifties Elvis style. Why all dykes seem to want to look like Elvis
Presley, I still don't understand, but Lora was one of the better at it I've
known.
She had a
white cotton shirt with ruffles on the pockets and seams, a cowgirl shirt she
wore dancing in Calgary, and she found that wearing it while out with me was
enough. The ruffles on the cuffs of the long sleeves also covered crude ugly
jailhouse tattoos on her forearms and wrists, another reason she owned it.
Instead of
her leather jacket, she took to wearing a baggy worn old top, very casual, and
slipping it off it as soon as we sat down someplace.
So I started
to introduce her to the old-fashioned rules of courtesy, the way my Norwegian
grandmother had taught me to escort a lady out walking.
Always
supposed to be on the outside, the side nearest the traffic when we were
walking in the street. "That's so I can protect you, you see, in case a
carriage came along in the street and splashed us with mud from its wheels-I
would be the one to get splashed."
Lora knew
that for a guy to walk with his girlfriend on the outside meant that she was
for sale, so she knew most of the time it was the other way around. She'd never
heard of the other before, though. We practiced walking like that, me grabbing
big heavy doors for her. "That part always made sense to me," she
said. "Guys really are so much stronger than chicks are, it just seemed
fair."
Another
thing I liked about her, she said "guys" and "chicks" like
I did, we both didn't pay a lot of attention to political correctness. Lora just
was who she was, never had been anything but a dyke. Never really had a family,
just a series of group homes she felt no attachment to. So for her, there was
no coming-out crisis. She simply grew
up a lesbian, never particularly worried about it, part of being an outlaw in
general.
Always out,
she was used to having people look at her, register her as a lesbian, react to
her however they were going to. It didn't bother her. Yet when she was with me
that disappeared. As we seemed to others an ordinary couple in the city, so
they simply tuned us out and usually didn't notice us at all.
She took to
sort of tagging along with me if I went out, like to the library or something.
Watched me take out books. She enjoyed the effect for its novelty, and said it gave
her a sense of freedom in the city she had not felt before.
She started
to do things I suggested to add to the effect. Jeans were okay, and what she
usually wore anyway. Heavy black shoes she was used to, and they didn't need
any changing. I once suggested she wear some bright red lipstick, and she
nearly laughed her face off. "Dykes don't wear lipstick! Christ, what if
we met some of my friends on the street! I'd be laughed back to Calgary!"
It had
happened. We did bump into her dyke friends now and then, usually in groups of
two or three. They took me as a friend of hers right away. Shook hands. Asked
about other people.
She had a
pair of simple silver flower earrings among her jewelry, and we added to the
effect by her wearing them. Short cropped haircut showing her ears clearly, and
the single flowers in one of her three or four ear piercings suggesting a more
conservative woman.
I 36, she
32, we were the right age to be a long-term couple together, and the
comfortable intimacy that grew between us as we lived together in the house
made it easy to act like one.
We started
using one of my father, the traveling salesman's favorite techniques: the
seven-second interval. While standing in a line-up, or entering a doorway, at
points where a few people could see us at once, and would form a first
impression of us. Which people do, within a seven-second interval, people form
a first impression that tends to last in their minds.
So I asked
her "if you can put up with this..." and I drew her closely to me
with one arm. We were on good hugging terms by then, and when I felt her relax.
I bussed her gently with a kiss on her hair, just where it was thickest on her
head. "..that will suggest to anyone looking at us that we're a straight
couple out together." I let her go, and she stepped away from me a little,
her dazzling blue eyes looking straight into mine. She didn't mind.
"Or you
can be the one to start it, that would really suggest it, that we're a straight
couple. You could just reach out and touch my arm, or stand up on tiptoe to
whisper something in my ear. Do something that makes it look like you're very
physically comfortable with me, like you're used to touching me all the time.
That would really do it."
"Do
what?" she asked. I was stuck, had to answer.
"Well,
make us look like a straight couple by making it look like we were having sex
together, Lora." I gulped, hoping she wouldn't get mad.
"Oh!"
Again she looked up at me. Surprised, not mad. "Is that part of what we've
been doing?"
"It's
always been part of it, yes, but with you being the one to touch me
spontaneously, it really does send that message, yes."
She hadn't
realized that. There was a pause as she thought about it. "You can stop
doing it if you want to, Lora, it would be okay if you didn't want to
anymore." Her face didn't change, thoughtful, as she asked herself
something. "I know it's not for real, honey, it's just a short con we're
pulling." She nodded.
As it turned
out, she didn't mind. We practiced it, things like her slipping her arm into
mine as we came around a corner in a mall. That one really worked.
Once we were
sitting in a fast food place in a mall, she gestured me to come closer. I bent
my head so she could whisper in my ear. "Is this what you meant, look like
we're together by doing this?" Our heads so close together for a moment.
I nodded my
head and straightened up, and she sat back up and looked around her. Looking at
all the people in the mall without having them look back at her. She leaned back
in the plastic seat and looked around her. Noticed an old couple sitting across
the way.
"What
do you think of them, Gordon?" she asked.
"Look
like they've been married forever." I said. "Certainly don't have to
get dressed up to go out together." They were dressed in heavy layers of
winter clothes. "That's the secret to being happy, I think. Marrying the
right person." Something I'd learned watching grandparents happy in later
life just being together.
"Do you
think we could ever do that, Gordon?" she asked.
"Do
what?"
"Get
married," she said, and gestured with her shoulder at the old couple.
"Like that."
I couldn't
believe my ears. She was talking about marrying me. For real, I knew Lora
didn't kid about stuff like this.
"I want
to have kids, Lora," was all I could think of to say.
She fixed me
again with her bright blue eyes, something she knew got to me every time. Knew
because I'd told her. "That's okay," she said. Slipped her ankle back
across her knee, an arm spread over the chair next to her, she looked me
straight in the eye. The brash cocky dyke I liked.
I couldn't
say anything. There, the litter of a fast-food lunch in front of us, a woman
had just offered to have my children.
"I can
have sex with straight guys, Gordon."
"I
know." Or I had, pretty much.
"How
did you know?"
"Oh,
your background mostly, Lora, someone with your history as a criminal would
almost certainly have worked as a prostitute at one time or another. I just
guessed."
"I
see." She was surprised, but not astonished. "Why didn't you bring it
up before?"
"I
didn't want to hurt your feelings." A phrase I used about fifty times a
week living with gay women. "I knew it was probably something you wanted
to forget about."
"It
is." she said.
Later,
talking to the girls, she said it was as if she had a magic cloak of
invisibility, that when she was with me I could cast a spell and make her
invisible, another woman out with her boyfriend in the afternoon in the city.
The
Identical Redheaded Twin Sisters and the Long Weekend in Sudbury
Lora and I
got so good at this and other gags, we ended up pulling a really good one on a
young cop. Brian, a 26-year old trainee, was the first, with his training
sergeant one who responded when Chris and Sarah first phoned to complain about
JF, the scary nut case in the basement. Brian was involved throughout the case.
Somehow he
and other male cops got the impression that I was having sex with all the women
in the place, even though nobody ever said anything like it to them. Men, I
guess.
Lora was the
first to tell me this, she figured it out from some things she heard the cops
talking amongst themselves.
There I was,
apparently, according to them, sleeping with a young blonde with big boobs, two
20-year-old identical twin brunette sisters, and Lora, a little older, with
black hair.
So I figured
all that was missing was the redheads. If I was this cool guy, I might be
complaining about a lack of redheaded pussy in my life. So I started
complaining about the lack of redheaded pussy in my life.
The chance
came when we, once again, had to phone the cops about JF's bizarre behavior.
Brian was waiting for his sergeant to come back in the living room of the old
house, Lora in the kitchen on the other side, and me in the foyer by the front
door.
"Whatever
happened to the good old days when redheaded pussy flowed from the trees, eh,
Lora?" I decided to push my luck a little further. "Remember those
twenty-year-old identical twin redheaded sisters in Sudbury, baby?"
I shot the
remark room-to-room, into the room Lora was in, knowing that Brian must hear in
between. Trusting her to pick up on a gag line, we'd been fooling around with
improvisational comedy for a while by then. She didn't let me down.
"Sweeter
than honey, Gordon!" she shot back.
"Tight,
too," I added.
"Mmm-hmm!"
she answered, running out of new lines but playing along.
"Best
long weekend of my life!" I ended.
Then we both
walked back into the living room where Brian had been listening. The look on
his face was unbelievable. The young cop looked at me like I was God.
-/30/-