That
first spring I spent in State College, Hope swept hopelessly away from my
friends and I as a siren. With her pitch black hair, dark eye make-up, Cure
shirts, she embodied the mystery of the Gothic, which was a countercultural
subtext in the Nineties about outsider-ism, what it meant to subsist as a freak
in the world. I didn’t know what she would be like up close— as of August, and
the fall semester starting, the dimensional angle hit me as hard as Hope did,
who was not taking no for an answer, with any of us. The attitude, once you
gained access to her room, was as pure Don Juana as it could be. When she,
frankly, pulled off her panties and offered me her crotch, the heat of it made
me swoon, so that I could only half-function. She was too bold, too blunt. All
of her was fiercely dark, and the fade into her was to cleave to the darkness.
Yet, the tactile thing, about lovemaking and sex and the right kinds of
delicacy and the right blend or savior faire towards mixing seductiveness,
aggression, and restraint, was beyond her. Hope wanted sex to manifest as a
Gothic ideal, a stand taken for burrowing into each other’s permanent,
corrosive darkness. What two bodies are actually supposed to do to make sex a
something pleasurable, was not a relevant reality, when all that black eyeliner
spoke more. All of which meant that sex here fell down, past her sharp
jaw-line, bulging eyes, and exotically wrought face, into a way of
demonstrating rebellion, obstinacy against the normative, but also awkwardness
between two bodies hardening and softening in and out of harmony with each
other, with their own nudity, and with an attitude too militant, too fierce. I
learned that, movies and other cultural talisman objects aside, real sex
requires real tenderness, for men as well as women, and when tenderness goes
missing, so, generally, does ecstasy.
