I need to backtrack here and explain a few things.

You see, I had always thought the Ann Street house where I lived during my early college years was a commune. But it was no more a real commune than its basement rec room—which Daddy had built and where Yarn Man and I had holed up for a few lost weeks—was a real hippie crash pad. There was nothing at all about the lifestyle Trent, Stella, Pammy and I were living at the time that was truly communal, least of all in any utopian, sixties sense. We were all simply housemates who shared a living space. We each rented our own bedrooms and shared certain other spaces in the house. We didn’t buy food together or even eat together all that often; we didn’t have a set list of chores or obligations. We just cooperated and respected one another, and otherwise took care of our own messes. Otherwise, we all remained very suburban and middle-class in our outlook.

The residence attached to the Holistic-Humanist church was another matter. It had been founded by dedicated socialists who wanted to live communally, and they established a long tradition—since at least the sixties—of a lifestyle that was more rigidly regimented than anything I’d ever seen. It was more intimate than dorm living, and certainly more intimate than sharing a house. Food was bought together and shared—it was purchased on a weekly basis at the organic food co-op, naturally—and processed foods were strictly forbidden. Chores were assigned and rigidly scheduled. If you wanted to visit any resident, it had to be approved by the group beforehand—a week in advance—and could only take place at certain times of the day. No visitor could ever stay overnight, so if you wanted to bring home a lover, you were shit out of luck.

Why a group of mostly megaheroes agreed to these strictures is beyond me. Rubber Brother, the Y+Thems, and my sister Avie inherited these dogmas from their hippie predecessors unquestioningly, and even though in theory they could elect to change things, collectively decided to submit to tradition. Snag and Domina—the ones who had most wanted to be free of the yoke of the Y+Thems when they lived at the Navy Yards in Brooklyn—were paradoxically the most enthusiastic about maintaining the house rules, and even more strict in enforcing them than their predecessors had been, according to Rubber Brother who was a holdover from the previous group of seventies residents.

I knew I could never live that kind of lifestyle, and I had worried for Avie at first; but she became so freakishly committed to that way of life, it was as if she’d suddenly joined a cult. Of course I knew she’d never become a megahero, but in every other respect her life was now completely wrapped up with that of the Y+Thems. It was like she was the new team mascot now that Kiddo had graduated to motherhood. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had become Dana’s lover in the bargain, but Avie maintained a string of boyfriends, mostly theater types she encountered at Warren Woodward University.

Dana, however, had pursued me—quite aggressively, for a while—there’s no other way to describe it. From the moment she arrived in Detroit, she had made it very clear that she wanted me—she liked my body and wanted to bed me. She never stalked me; she didn’t need to, since I live practically next door. I never felt threatened, although she was a considerably powerful woman—more in terms of personality but certainly also physically, at least more than the civilian lesbians that hung out at the Bottleneck & Tie-Up Bar. But, although I had seen her pry apart Big, Blue Bulky Guy and B-50, the Hybrid Man—two behemoths of considerable, I knew she’d be no match for Ms. Megaton Man.

But Domina still made me feel uncomfortable. She was always being so complimentary all the time, in ways that I didn’t find flattering. “I like that you’re flat,” she used to say. Or, “Who needs big udders unless they’re breeders?” And, “You’ve got powerful legs—but they’d look a whole lot better if you didn’t shave.” Not exactly romantic sonnets, at least to my ears, but it was clearly her way of courting. I worried she was going to start writing me love letters, but I needn’t have; flowery phrases obviously weren’t her forte.

I thought recent events had put all that to rest—that Dana had gotten the message she wasn’t my type. She’d actually had honest conversations with me, without a hint of sexual innuendo, and we’d even tackled Megatonic University together, as part of a team. I thought her infatuation had finally dissipated. But then, when I least expected it, there it was again, in full court press. And I relented.

I never wanted to be rude with her because I knew what it felt like to be so close to someone you wanted so badly—it’s a horrible, achy feeling. I suppose I figured if I just gave her a tumble on Devil’s Night she might get it out of her system—and also I needed to get laid. But it only led to more problems. Even though she disappeared in my sleep, the next time I saw she was all possessive—this happened at the Bottleneck & Tie-Up Bar, in front of Avie, Nancy, Audrey, and Donna. I had to put my foot down and declare that Dana and I were not in any way, shape, or form a couple, and she needed to knock off this bullshit of treating my like her property. For a moment, I was worried Ms. Megaton Man was going to have to have a knock-down, drag-out battle with Domina just as I’d had to do with the Human Meltdown. But, much to my surprise, Dana just burst into tears and ran off. I was mortified—convinced that I’d really hurt her feelings.

I felt bad about publicly humiliating Dana—she disappeared for the next week or so and I got the distinct impression she was avoiding me. I finally had to corner her over at the church and literally beg her to come over to my place again so I could make it up to her. We ended up sixty-nining, which at least meant we wouldn’t have to talk. But she regarded it as a form of going down on herself. She actually stopped in the middle of it to criticize me. “You’re not doing it right,” she said. “The way I’m licking you, you’re supposed to lick me.” That’s what she said, I kid you not. What a cunt—and I use the word advisedly.

Even though I’d enjoyed what we’d been doing, I was so offended by her demands that I kicked her out right then and there. It was definitely the end of anything sexual between us.

Soren later explained to me this had all been classic Dana: supremely manipulative and a total control freak—from the histrionics about having a crush on me, to pretending to have hurt feelings when I rejected her in public, to ordering me around when we sixty-nined. And he was right. Dana was just about the most narcissistic woman I’d ever met. Attractive women for Dana were merely surrogates for herself. She once bragged she could spend hours in front of a mirror, she was so in love with her own body—and she did have a very fit body. She said a good full-length mirror was her most indispensable piece of workout equipment. Relationships, being merely functional, were always a letdown for Dana—they offered some mystery and intrigue at the beginning, but always ended up disappointing. It was the conquest that was important. Again, so much like a man.

Domina thought of herself as a man in every respect when it came to women, she once told me. She loved desirable women in every way a man loves them except of course physiologically. She was in love with their beauty even when they seldom rivalled her own attractiveness. She would have been content with herself—she was about the most self-sufficient person, emotionally, I have ever known—except, she said, “It kinda gets boring, you know?” No kidding. She liked smart women, intellectuals—women smarter than herself, at least. Women who were dumb were a complete turn-off for her, unless she happened upon one she regarded as more beautiful. And being in every respect totally hot herself, that rarely ever happened.

Dana really had the hots for Stella, and continued to pester me for an introduction even after our own short fling was history. Dana couldn’t believe that I had never wanted to sleep with Stella, nor had ever so much as fantasized about her; but honestly, I had never thought of Stella in that way. Stella was beautiful, of course, and I was in awe of her, but more like the awe one has for a movie star or an athlete, not in an attainable way. Stella was such a bombshell—with the kind of curves men find so appealing—I could never imagine her with another woman anyway. Although I had briefly wondered if she and Pammy might be partners. But the idea was so absurd I immediately discounted the possibility. Just having Stella as a friend seemed remote at first. But then, that was a zillion years ago when I had been a nerdy, shrimpy, repressed little studious student.

Stella didn’t even love men, much less women. Stella was a self-sufficient Earth Mother, almost as self-sufficient as Dana, the only difference being one of sexual orientation. Stella was what Dana would have called a breeder. After it was clear Stella was pregnant and Trent, the father, had shown up in Ann Arbor, I’d hoped the two of them might become romantic again. But Stella never showed the least interest in the man who had sired her pending child. After Stella gave birth to Simon, she’d been virtually celibate, announcing several times she had no plans to mate again until she was ready for a second child—although the last time we had spoken she’d intimated to me that she had resorted to Trent sexually once or twice merely to let off steam. Stella wasn’t the narcissist Dana was; I think it was just that Stella didn’t desire sex with anyone more than she wanted to be left to her child and her studies at this time in her life. I suppose Stella found relationships too demanding, and the risk of betrayal too costly, emotionally. In any case, Dana might as well have yearned for the Man on the Moon as to want to bed Stella Starlight.

Even though I had broken it off with Dana in short order, it was awkward having Domina practically next door in the church residence and still carrying a torch for me, and living with my little sister and the Y+Thems all in the same commune, no less. Dana was really kind of immature toward me for a long time, although she eventually fixated on another infatuation: a tall, auburn haired woman named Andrea Revell. But more on the Negative Woman some other time.

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***

Detroit was the kind of place to get in, get out, get it done. Dana loved the scene because there was absolutely no pretense about it. There was such an active lesbian separatist community, she said, because everyone who’d come to Detroit had come for one thing and one thing only: to not conform to anyone’s expectations. It wasn’t necessarily an aversion to materialistic, suburban, middle-class culture per se, although many people who braved the harsh urban environment of Detroit did so out of a genuine political, philosophical, and aesthetic revulsion to suburbia. It was more about being unwilling to sacrifice one’s honesty and integrity—and surrendering one’s real self—that membership in the suburban middle class seemed to demand. Detroit may have been an rundown hell hole in those days, but it had that much going for it.

My sexual awakening may have taken place in Ann Arbor, but Detroit was where I had sex. Not as frequently as during my initial binge moment, to be sure, when I felt the need to make up for lost time, but more deeply, more slowly, and with a seriousness of purpose that may only have come with living in a post-industrial urban landscape. People lived in Detroit to go to med school or to Warren Woodward University or to one of the state school extensions or to art school—and little else, at least that I was aware of. You weren’t going to meet the love of your life, be charmed by the amenable environs, and settle down here forever. You were there to work, and after that work was done you went to bars because you wanted to meet someone to fuck, sleep it off, then get back to work. There was a simplicity and machine-like logic to the place one had to admire—it was the Motor City, after all. The freaks and weirdos who remained behind after the tax base fled, or came rushing in as urban pioneers before gentrification took hold, were more true to that spirit than the straight, white, Europeans who had usurped the place from the Native Americans—the first human beings to settle along the Lower Straits of the Great Lakes and establish it as a major center, long before French fur trappers came along and built their forts. Those straights had abandoned Detroit, and were now in the process of converting the surrounding farmland into asphalt and strip malls. Us queers had taken over in the meantime, and were getting our rocks off.

And if that was your lifestyle—post-Native American, post-white middle class, post-industrial—and Dana with her mohawk and her studded leather bikini somehow subconsciously crystalized all those things—it was because you refused to conform and would never conform to straight suburban culture. That was no doubt why the Y+Thems took to Detroit so well. Dana said she had to go looking for the lesbian subculture in New York, but in Detroit, you couldn’t miss it—it was right there, with a lot of everything else. Even Soren came out, after a long time wrestling with his sexuality. Imagine a half-man, half-saber-toothed tiger coming out, a process maybe hundreds of thousands of years in the making. It was liberating. Detroit was the place to be comfortable with who you were—it practically demanded that as a prerequisite. There wasn’t an incentive to conform and there wasn’t any set pattern to conform to, so you’d better have your own clear idea of who you were.

And there were a lot of individuals in that sense in Detroit—people who knew who they were and weren’t looking to change for anybody. They might be open to new experiences, sure, but for the most part they had made up their minds about what they wanted. I don’t think I ever met anyone in Detroit who was looking to change their mind or be converted. That was for places like Ann Arbor.

Consequently, there were a lot of non-conformist lifestyles, art movements, and fringe politics on offer in Detroit. Politics, such as it was, was always oppositional, confrontational. Many were folks who had made up their minds they weren’t going to participate in conventional politics at all, which gave them the freedom to explore socialism and communism and communal lifestyles like the Holistic-Humanist church residence offered. You didn’t just read about it for some sociology class or go off into the country to found your own utopia; you put it into practice it right then and there, in the city—the decaying city that industry, the economy, and society had left behind.

The free newspaper The Fifth Wheel was emblematic of that political outlook. Named after a kind of pun—Detroit after all was the motor city, whose primary export to the world had been four-wheeled vehicles—The Fifth Wheel, by announcing its uselessness, could indulge in all sorts of thought experiments about giving up technology, civilization, even art and language itself. The highly-articulate if whacky essays it published made garden-variety Marxism and socialism seem run of the mill, conservative and anemic, even. Apparently, the contributors to The Fifth Wheel, who didn’t agree on much, agreed the human species had gone off the rails as soon as it developed language, social hierarchy, and living in sedentary settlements. They aspired to return to the trees and live life like animals—assuming you could find a tree that hadn’t been cut down. Life would be more egalitarian and free, even if it were more nasty, brutish, and short. The end of education, in this over-educated view, was to forego all knowledge and communication and live like mindless biological organisms.

I didn’t fall in with any of these folks, needless to say; The Fifth Wheel represented a fringe group among fringe groups. I was in Detroit to be close to my family, and because I wanted to get my degree and move on. In the meantime, I also wanted to get laid—and when I wanted to fuck, I wanted to fuck—then get back to work. But the completely impractical, fringe anti-technology radical politics gave it all an edge.

I certainly wasn’t committed to lesbianism as a lifestyle, either. I probably had my pick of guys, if I had bothered, since I was reasonably attractive—women who were attractive at all being something of a scarce commodity in Detroit in those days, at least in the circles I traveled in. I hadn’t done badly with guys in Ann Arbor, especially during that binge, but then I had just found my megapowers and was wearing my spiffy new Ms. Megaton Man uniform which made me feel like a million bucks—it had given me an unbelievable sense of self-confidence and erotic self-worth. In Detroit, I had reverted to mousy civilian student Clarissa James again, with concomitant low self-esteem and a reluctance to compete in the heterosexual meat market.

Maybe that’s why I had succumbed to Dana so readily—she was so much better looking than me, or so I felt, and I was flattered. And it was certainly Sampson McSampson calling me pretty that had won me over that time. But if I had learned anything from those and similar experiences, it was that waiting for what I wanted to come to me wasn’t going to work anymore.

I should have had the confidence to ask Gene Griffin out when I met him, right then and there, because he was gorgeous. But my lack of confidence had held me back. I’d been kicking myself about it ever since. I vowed to myself that if I ever had the chance to rectify that mistake, I would do so without hesitation.

***

I was home one evening typing up the proofreading corrections Kozmik Kat had spotted in my senior thesis when came a knock at my door. “Who is it?” I said. The landlord had already slid my day’s mail under the door, and I wasn’t expecting Avie or anyone else.

When I opened the door, there was Gene Griffin—tall, dark, broad-shouldered, devastatingly handsome—with a smile that nearly filled the doorway by itself. “Please forgive my presumption, Clarissa,” he said. “I should have called ahead, but phones leave records. I hope you don’t mind, but I happened to know you had the night off, so…”

“Come in,” I said, grabbing his arm and dragging him in. I quickly closed the door behind him.

“This is nice,” he said. “Cozy.”

“Let me take your coat,” I said, practically tearing it off of him and draping it over my stool.

“I just thought maybe you’d let me take you to dinner sometime,” said Gene. “I see you’re busy with school work; if not tonight, then maybe some night this week. Allan and I are working an undercover case downtown, bank fraud. We’ll be in the vicinity for at least another week…”

“Please, have a seat,” pushing him across my studio. “My sofa’s a bed. What am I saying? I mean, my bed’s a sofa.”

“Uh, thanks,” said Gene. We sat down, pillows stacked against the wall, under the angled attic roof. “I don’t mean to be so forward, but I thought maybe dinner, a movie…”

I grabbed him and kissed him. We kissed for a very long time.

“Um, okay,” said Gene, after I finally let him breath again. “Usually, the first kiss comes after the first date. Call me old-fashioned…”

“I’ve wanted you since I first laid eyes on you,” I blurted out. Some of Dana Dorman seemed to have rubbed off on me. “I should have told you the moment I met you. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you.”

“Well, that’s very flattering,” said Gene. “I felt a spark, too; I’m glad I was right. So, how about Mexican Town, or Little Italy, or Greektown…”

“I’m not hungry,” I said, entwining my leg over his thigh. “Let’s just stay in.”

“Well,” said Gene, a little flustered. “I wasn’t really expecting this. I’m really attracted to you, Clarissa, but I’m not a casual guy like I used to be. I kinda thought we could get to know each other a bit before…”

“I’m having my period right,” I said. I could feel his erection—and it was a good-sized one—growing next to my calf. “But we can do other stuff.”

“Boy, you work fast,” said Gene. “Usually sex comes after the date. I didn’t even bring flowers…”

“I have a feeling about people,” I said, convinced that I sounded very confident and mature. “I was suspicious about the white van at first. But you said you were there to protect Audrey and Hadleigh and Nancy, and no harm’s come to them since—so I guess you check out.”

“Yes, but don’t you like going out? Getting to know someone? You know, going on a date?”

“A date?” I said. It was like a word from a foreign language.

“A date,” said Gene, incredulous. “You do like to go out, don’t you?”

“Sure, I go out,” I said. “And bring people home.”

“I don’t mean picking people up,” said Gene. Then he saw the expression on my face. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to judge. That’s fine and everything. But don’t you like to date someone first, to find out what you have in common, what affinities…?”

“I once went to the museum with a friend of mine,” I said. “We ended up in the sack. Does that count as a date?”

“Oh, sweetheart,” he said, taking me by the hand. “You’ve never really had a romance, have you?”

“Do you think I’m a bad person?” I said, mortified.

“Not at all,” said Gene, smiling. “We’re in extraordinary lines of work, after all—the Penetrator and Ms. Megaton Man. Maybe it’s just a generational difference, too. I am a good bit older than you.” He looked around my student garret apartment with its angled attic ceiling like he had entered a nursery to rob a cradle. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea…”

I reached with my hand and rubbed his erection through his clothes. “Please don’t leave,” I said. “We can take it as slowly as you want. We can just talk. Or…” I continued rubbing him, “Please don’t leave.”

My fingers found his zipper; I slowly undid his fly.

Gene looked at me soberly. “I’m not leaving, Clarissa,” he said.