Lauren Sanders is a novelist and journalist who lives in New York City. Her writing has appeared in publications including The American Book Review, Poets & Writers, and Time Out/New York. She is co-editor of the anthology Too Darn Hot: Writing About Sex Since Kinsey, published by Persea Books in 1998. She is a graduate of Columbia University's school of journalism and has an MA in Creative Writing from City College in New York.

Excerpted with permission from Kamikaze Lust
Chapter Eight – "Porn Queen for a Day"
by Lauren Sanders
lauren@jezebelle2000.com
Akashic Books, NYC
Phone: (718) 222-1882
ISBN# 1-888451-08-4

After Shade left, I started taking long walks through Central Park with big sunglasses and a scarf wrapped tightly around my head. I'd gone totally Jackie O, afraid even strangers might see the fire in me, the blush from my pop-gun that sent me out into the winter-wet air conjuring in my mind images of hiking boots, snow flurries at football games, and commercials for cold medicine. Today, I felt the perfect pitch of blue, like the weather. Or PMS.

I needed a hot dog with blood-orange onions. Never mind that I'd inhaled half a chocolate cake before leaving my apartment, I was hungry. These days my appetite was voracious, insatiable, fill in the adjectives. A hedonist's delight to fit my video box. Let's try ravenous: Nothing was never enough, at night she cried out for more...Silver Ray is "Ravenous!"

So I kibitzed with my inner porn star as we hiked the urban tundra over to a hot dog stand. A man stood in front of me blowing smoke into his bare hands as the vendor ladled his hot dog with mustard and ketchup. It was short, the dog; probably less than six inches. At home, I'd been measuring objects with a wooden ruler, and then holding them against my stomach to see how high they'd get up inside of me. I needed some idea where twelve inches might land. A workable equation. The carrots, celery stalks, squashes, and cucumbers I'd purchased but had yet to eat all fell between six and nine inches. Bananas were about the same. The handle of my brush was five inches, the hammer ten, TV remote five, toothbrush holder six, cardboard kaleidoscope five and a half, pop-gun eight if you measured from the coconuts on the handle.

The man in front of me paid the vendor and I ordered my little dog. Turns out, six inches was nothing, eight completely manageable, but only if it was as thin as my pop-gun. The other day I wrapped a condom around a nine-inch cucumber, but even greased couldn't get anywhere with it. Holding it against the toy gun I realized the vegetable was about three times as thick. Circumference was key. Pi times radius squared = R squared = RR = too big.

I ate my hotdog so fast the roof of my mouth was raw, then made my way to the skating rink to watch the ruddy faces go round and round, taking comfort in the other bodies braving this cold fish of a day. I stayed until I couldn't feel my toes.

At the 72nd Street exit, I came upon Santa Claus ringing his bell over a Salvation Army bucket. I smiled. He said, "Merry Christmas, baby," which I ignored. Nobody but Shade could get away with calling me that. "Are you on a soap opera?" he said even louder this time and, though I was tempted to say I was a porn star, I kept walking. "Bitch!" he blurted.

I turned around. "Excuse me?"

"You heard me," he said, his yellow-white beard attached crookedly to his lips, his muddy brown eyes full of blank rage. Something about his face reminded me of Kaminsky.

"How can you say that? You don't even know me."

"I know your type."

"You don't know anything."

"I know enough, you're a-"

"Don't you dare!" I screamed, alarmed by the menacing beat of my heart. A few people had gathered around us, apparently to see who had the temerity to raise her voice at Santa Claus. Naughty, not nice; I had to calm down. I leaned back a few steps and turned away.

"See that's it," he taunted, shook his bell. "The way you move your head."

"What?"

"You know what."

"Look, do you have a permit or something? I'll call your supervisor." The knot of my silk scarf gripped my neck. This made me angrier at Santa Claus. He said something I didn't hear, then laughed so hard his cheap beard shook. Everyone around joined the playground choir. My chest cavity vibrated madly. Before I knew what was happening, I saw both of my palms stretch out in front of me and push against the pillow in his chest. He tripped backwards and I kept pounding my fists against him, hoping to knock him over and shut him up. A thick arm grabbed me from behind. "Hey, settle down!"

I swung around and came face-to-face with the strong arm of the NYPD, the man's uniform as ridiculously blue as Santa's was red. I sniffled once or twice, wiped a tear from my eye, afraid that I'd flipped. The cop screamed away the crowd and led us toward Santa's unmanned coin bucket.

Had someone described this scene to me, I would not have recognized myself. Normally, I walked away from arguments, avoided scenes, and always backed down from physical contact. Whenever my parents started fighting I was the first to sprint from the room, and I spent too many hours hiding from my brothers. Once, when I was about ten, I did try to kick Neil, but like a masked goalie he caught my foot and I fell flat on my ass. For weeks my walk was unbalanced and he called me a gimp.

That pain in my ass returned as I shrank further inside my skin. Santa brushed a few twigs from his suit and said, "She's fucking crazy, she hit me."

"He called me a bitch!"

"Okay, okay, I heard all I want to hear from both of you right now." The cop held out his hand in front of me, then turned to Santa. "Are you all right?"

"Barely, man," he said. "She should be locked up."

The cop nodded, yeah, yeah, then told me stay put while he walked Santa a few steps, whispering. I watched the cars speed to make the green light at 72nd, some zipping like luge racers through the park's curved entrance. Two girls dressed in little Eskimo coats ran past. "Mommy!" one said, "Tiffany killed one of God's creatures!" "Did not!"

"Did too, I saw you smush it." The mother seemed oblivious, took each child by the hand and dragged them across the street as they screamed: did not, did too, did not, did too…

I was suddenly embarrassed by what the cop must have seen, this diminutive mortal picking a fight with the season. She of the bugged-out sunglasses, and head wrapped in a babushka-by Armani, okay, but the shtetl connotations obvious nonetheless. I ripped the scarf from my head, setting my hair free. My ears burned, would soon be pink and pulsating like the rest of me. I was out of control, as if anything could happen; maybe this was what it felt like to be my mother.

The cop returned, said Santa wasn't going to press charges. "He's not! Oh, that's really great." Again, I felt the blood rush to my face. "He's a disgrace to that suit, the creep."

"Listen, lady, you got a problem with Santa Claus, call the North Pole. My advice to you is just go home."

I was too angry, the scene too absurd. So I tramped off, almost stomping on a framed picture of the Statue of Liberty, which kicked off a line of enlarged color snapshots lining the scarred cobblestones. A sign above them read: "Makes perfect holiday gifts." I wanted to take my platform boots and smash each picture. Like the Eskimo girl with a thing for smiting bugs, I would pulverize the World Trade Center, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Chrysler Building, the Museum of Fucking Modern Art. I hated this city sometimes, it's slick skyscrapers and shiny streets; its tired, humble, poor, and weak all trying to keep up with the Joneses and Smiths and Slivowitzes, our voices blending a dirge despicably modern, like the big-bang of a holiday blockbuster, a virtual mushroom cloud over the all-new brilliantly digitized Times Square. So modern, so
now, twilight's last gleaming. New York was falling apart with progress, going down on me, and all I wanted was to go home and masturbate. Use my fingers, the pop-gun, anything to silence the raving lunatic who'd pitched a tent in my cunt. But I was not crazy, not like my mother, not crazy, not like my mother.

I clenched my fists deep inside the pockets of my wool overcoat, and fought the mournful winds all the way home, where opening the door for me in his tight, synthetic-fiber, stripe-down-the-side doorman pants was Yossi the Israeli. Not to be confused with Yuri the Ukrainian who had a terrible acne problem, nor Max the gaunt Bronx native who could tell you where every celebrity in the area had lived or died. Yossi was my favorite. He smelled nice and had good teeth. But before today I'd never thought about dragging him by the balls down to the laundry room and screwing him in a Sensurround sort of way; hard, bloody, and foreboding. My desire these days took two genres: X-posure and Sensurround. Call it a yin-yang thing. A battle of milk and meat.

Yossi pressed the elevator button for me and I noticed his fingers, thick and probing. Those fingers could ravage me...Silver Ray is "Ravaged!" A bing and the elevator doors opened. "Have a good day," he smiled, the moment gone.

Upstairs: the mail. Solicitations, magazines, bills, which seemed to arrive more frequently than they did before the strike, and one mailing envelope with Shade's handwriting still reeking of indelible magic marker. I felt inexplicably happy, silly as a showtune. It had been a week since our conversation and part of me was afraid it was all a dream, the sex-talk, the coming, her oh, baby, I want you so much!

Not fast enough did I cut the envelope and amid the newspaper shavings remove a Ziploc bag full of green M&Ms. My body swelled as if my internal organs were being pumped. I stripped down to my tank and underpants, sat cross-legged on my bed and pulled open the bag. I rolled a smiling green M&M between my thumb and forefinger. Popped it in my mouth, sucking until the coating melted and I tasted the sweet chocolate inside. A tear escaped the corner of my eye: you little sapster. I stuck my entire
hand in the bag and with my fist squeezed and released.

Green fingers sticking to the phone, I called Shade in Atlanta, never so excited about talking to anyone in my life. The way she said my name when she picked up, as if I were the only person in the world, made me feel drippy again. She told me to hold on, there was someone on the other line. I sucked another M&M, fearing the day I might be on the other end, dissed for caller number two. She clicked back.

"So is it true?"

"True?"

"About the green ones."

I laughed. "I wouldn't know, I'm completely premenstrual. I had a fight with Santa Claus in Central Park."

"How Scrooge."

"He started it."

I told her about the fight and she teased me. But before we could go any further she said she was on her way to the mall. Shopping with mother. "Seems we can only talk around the spirits of Donna and Calvin and Christian."

"I like mine when she's on Demerol."

"Are you okay?" she asked, her voice so present I thought I might start sobbing. Instead, I took off my tank.

"Yeah, I'm okay. Are you okay?"

"I think so. Is it cold there yet?"

"Freezing."

"Then you'd better stay inside. I'll call you later."

"Goodbye, Shade."

"Merry Christmas, baby." Her words left me stroking my pussy with an M&M, enough to taste myself on the candy. Freddy scratched at my toes. I nudged her away with my foot, touching myself with one hand and eating the M&Ms off of my stomach with the other.

The phone rang: I was screening. Mom's voice came, faintly, something about borrowing my jeep. I reached for the toy pop-gun she'd given me and imagined she'd put a spy camera inside. She was watching me masturbate. Her voice fragmented – you said you'd be here over the holidays.

...oh, yes.

– Lorraine's gotta be by her doctor.

I saw Aunt Lorraine's face and wanted to scream...no! The gun moved faster, fucked me deeper; stomping and smashing Mom's voice, breaking the whole damn world...ouch!...my toe...I kicked the cat and was coming and scared and coming and sad and coming and utterly humiliated. I smelled myself on the clammy sheets. That's it. I was through with this business. I reached for Freddy, but she mewed angrily, threw her tail up in my face. "I'm sorry," I said, talking to my cat, again. Each day took me one step closer to cat-ladyville. I knew I had to get out of solitary, yet everywhere I went I dragged my smelly bed along with me, wearing a sign that marked me worse than a scab. I was a daughter of Onan.

Next: Elena Georgiou