About Me
- Kola Kokahalla
- Some call me the space cowboy... Actually, no one calls me that. Not least of all because I'm a lady. A proper lady, with ambitions and passion and lipstick. I'm brimming with love and scorn, courage and fear, hope and disappointment, alcohol and pathos. And I make great pancakes!
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Saturday, July 10, 2010
Hungry Like The Wolf
7:03 AM | Posted by
Kola Kokahalla |
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We lounged at the river's edge, bulky plastic tape deck by our side, blasting the latest Duran Duran album and announcing which band member we intended to marry. Or rather I did. Cissy was unimpressed with their angular shoulders and pretty burgundy tinted hair or lilting English accents.
Instead she was silent, sponging cool water onto her neck and letting it run down into the top of the bathing suit she wore under her shirt, the unsung summer uniform of ripening teenage girls.
We were burning hot and sleepily content from our earlier breakfast feast. Cissy's parents took food seriously. In our house, breakfast was Nescafe and Pop Tarts. At Cissy's house we'd sit on the porch and eeat baked cherry bread and sip on fresh, hot brewed coffee with coconut milk and vanilla, sweetened with a heaping teaspoon of sophistication.
I tossed a pebble into the water, murky like root beer. "What do you think of Tommy Evans?" I asked. "I think he's pretty cute!" Tommy was in our class in school. He was conspicuously quiet, drank cappuccinos at the coffee shop after work and wrote his thoughts down in a black leather notebook. His hair was almost exactly like a blonde John Taylor and on weekends he wore a white blazer with the sleeves rolled up just so. He oozed "Miami Vice". I thought he was impossibly delicious and deep and brimming with mysterious energy.
Cissy, on the other hand, thought he was a pretentious idiot who owned too many mirrors.
"I think..." Cissy said slowly, tracing her name in the murky water with one toe, "That maybe I like girls. You know. Better than boys." She said it matter of fact, deliberately, like dripping honey into tea, long and slow.
We'd spent countless hours discussing the things teens obsess about. Music and movies. Boys and sex. Cissy had little enthusiasm for the latter and generally found boys to be shallow and immature with little to recommend them.
"Yeah?" I said, squinting I as gazed at her through a sunbeam.
"Did you ever wonder what it was like?" she asked. "You know, being with a girl?"
I'd frowned for a moment to contemplate, because truly I never had. My mind was pretty much frazzled with wondering what it was like being with a boy. And when it wasn't fixated on that it was stuffed full of MTV and algebra. I really had no interest in girls.
"What do two girls even do?" I asked. "I mean they don't...you know. Have things."
Cissy shrugged. "They do other stuff, I guess."
She swung her legs out of the water and sat cross legged, facing me. She leaned in closer and whispered low but fervently, as though divulging secret government codes.
"Tammy Winslow said her cousin Sherry is a lesbian. She says they have toys they put batteries in, and they use those. You know...instead of a penis."
"Oh." I said. "I think Ruth has one of those things."
Ruth was my aunt. I stayed at her house sometimes when my mother had to work nights. She was 26, impossibly blonde and well endowed in a way I knew I'd never be.
"Your aunt Ruth is a lesbian?" Cissy asked me, surprised.
"I don't know." I shrugged. "I don't think so. I mean she has Nelson..."
I liked Nelson. He worked as a mechanic, lean and brown and dirty. His hair was overgrown and he was fond of not wearing a shirt. He wore scratchy old Levi's and the elastic band of his boxer shorts peeked out the top of his waistband. His teeth were a white slash of paint against an oil-smeared canvas, his smile like sharp white shards of sparks on flint. His body was hard from wielding an axe to split wood and his features were delicate almost feminine. A tattoo of a blue shark swam up his upper arm towards his shoulder, the long ago result of a night of heartache and too much beer.
We sat in silence for a good long while, Cissy wondering about Ruth and the Thing With Batteries, me thinking of Nelson and his tanned, rippled body, as the sun beat down on our backs and Duran Duran sang "The Chauffeur", while we lazily waved off earnest groaning mosquitoes.
In that one melting moment we realized we knew nothing at all.
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6 comments:
Very nice! Keep writing. Follow and comment on blogs you enjoy. It can take a little while, but the readership will come.
Thank you, I will. I'm happy to write for myself, but it certainly would be nice if other people stopped by, so thanks!
Well I for one will be following! This is great stuff, K'K'alla.
Once I knew nothing at all. I wish I had never become aware of it.
Yes it is hard to undo what is done. Sadly knowing nothing is harder than knowing things! Whatever that means.
You write very well! I have read all three posts! An excellent beginning!
Thank you Eva. I just like to ramble I think. :)
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