On my way out of Chas’s apartment building the next morning, who do I run into on the landing at the foot of the steps but Peggy, the rich white Grosse Pointe girl slumming in Detroit and studying literature at Warren Woodward University, returning from her escapades out on the town. The look on her face told me immediately she knew the kinds of sleazy things Chas and I had been up to the night before. “How is the undiscovered genius, anyway?” she asked dismissively. “Haven’t seen him crawl out from under his rock lately.”

“We’re collaborating on a graphic novel,” I said, with all the mock-gravity of a cultural critic. “He’s planning a one-man show at a very prestigious hole-in-the-wall beatnik art gallery.”

Peggy smirked as she unlocked her mail slot. “Collaborating? I see. Glad to hear Chas is making progress with whatever lofty career ambitions he has. And if you say you just dropped by at five in the morning to ogle funnybook art, I believe you.”

Never mind Peggy was clearly returning to her apartment in the same clothes she left with the night before. She even had some suspicious yellow-white stuff flaking off her sweater blouse. Jesus, she was even flatter on top than me.

She grabbed her mail and locked the box, then started up the stairs.

I had to ask, “So, Peggy, what kind of balls were you licking last night? Premed, prelaw, or the still-working-on his-MBA type?”

“Ha,” said Peggy mirthlessly, turning back toward me on the landing at the top of the steps. “What does it matter? We don’t have the same taste in partners, and we travel in completely different social circles.”

“And yet here we are,” I said, “in downtown Detroit. Just two single two girls hanging out, with love in our tummies.”

***

I walked home in a steam, annoyed by Peggy’s unearned sense of privilege and social superiority, and further irritated because the morning light was so raw and bright, and I didn’t bring my fucking sunglasses. Of course, all my lovers had been through the fuck mill with other people, but Chas was the first lover I’d had that was a direct sexual hand-me-down from someone I knew. Not only had he had an unlikely fling with Peggy that I stumbled upon first-hand, he’d also had a long acquaintance with my sister Avie that consisted mostly of chaste handjobs, according to her. In any case, I knew more about both relationships and in greater detail than I cared to.

Still, I was flattered by his interest in my dream-visions and to some extent seduced by his talent, which had remarkably progressed since earlier in the year—he learned to draw me more faithfully, not only with an erotic charge but actually appreciative of my body type, idealized but without amplification if you know what I mean. I also fell victim in a moment of weakness to my own pent-up, abstinence-induced horniness, plunging ahead despite the red flags, and slept with him—although we hadn’t done much sleeping. Imagine a couple of inept, fumbling geeks shooting a tacky, tasteless stag film in Super 8 and you’ll get the picture.

It was just a one-night stand, I told myself. A mistake, a bad decision, a moment of poor judgment; it certainly was not representative of me at my best. All the clichéd things a young woman tells herself especially after being caught red-handed enjoying herself, reveling in the muck. By the time I got back to my apartment, I had put the whole thing behind me. Or so I convinced myself. I had forgotten all about it, told myself it would never happen again, insisted it was an aberration. As if telling yourself a load of bullshit ever works.

I wondered how much of my morning-after grief was because I had done the deed (and several other, various deeds) with a white guy, and more importantly had to face the immediate approbation of a white girl. Clearly, it was the white part of my biracial mix that wanted to fit in, that judged myself by white standards, that was embarrassed—because even the raunchiest, most flagrant sex I’d had on other occasions, that remained secret and private, had seldom made me blanche before.

While my romp with Chas had been enjoyable, I also knew objectively that it was completely, unspeakably sleazy. I wasn’t even all that much attracted to Chas, and despite his lovely drawings I knew he wasn’t more than superficially attracted to me. We just needed to get off and found each other a convenient lay. It would have been all right if we could have kept it on the down-low.

I drove me crazy that Grosse Pointe Peggy knew my business. And it would only be a matter of time, I guessed, before Avie would find out.

***

Chas still continued to eat meals at our apartment and pal around with Avie—they continued to collaborate on costume designs, as she had six other performers besides herself to attire for her class project—and going on platonic dates to art openings and theater events. Chas also continued gathering material from me, but he no longer did that at our place, or show me updates on the unlikely comic book he converted them into. Instead, I had to take my blank book of dream visions over to East Willis for him to copy out, and look at his cartoon art there.

Keeping the project secret from Avie worked out for the best, since Avie wanted Chas the artist all to herself whenever he stopped by. And there was no doubt Chas’s talent and skills had steadily progressed. While he couldn’t resist augmenting and embellishing my dream visions with his own lurid imagination and absurdist sense of humor, there were moments in his drawings that matched what I had experienced in my head with uncanny accuracy. And there was no doubt he was doing inspired work for Avie, although she became suspicious. One day she remarked she had offered Chas a thank-you handjob, and he seemed hardly interested.

“I wonder if I’m losing my touch,” she said. “Or maybe, do you think … he finally got himself a girlfriend?”

“A jerk-off like that?” I said. “What kind of self-respecting woman would date him?”

I warned Chas not to whisper a word to my sister about our one night stand, which had already turned into multiple nights, but this only granted him the power to hold my secret over my head and subtly blackmail me for even more nights. Quickly, our rendezvouses had less to do with my dreams and his comics and more about the two of us reveling in the much-needed muck.

I insisted we only do it at his apartment, which was always strangely empty, even though he ostensibly had two roommates. Maybe he had some device that banished them to another dimension whenever he wanted the apartment—and me—all to himself, because I never even met them. In any case, we had the place all to ourselves, and we must have done it in every square foot of the place.

Before the semester had reached midterm, we had fallen into a rhythm in which he’d phone me up late and night when the coast was clear, and I would walk the six blocks over to East Willis.

“I know a booty call when I hear one,” remarked Avie about the ringing phone she’d heard the night before.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said. “What is a booty call, anyway?”

“That’s when your lover calls you up and says, ‘Get your sweet little booty over here, ‘cause I want to have at it.’ So, are you going to tell me who is it?”

“Nooooo,” I said, in a long, indignant drone. “It’s none of your business.” I was delighted she hadn’t a clue it was Chas, at least.

One good thing about the relationship was that Chas felt obligated to produce a lot of art to show me it was a true collaboration, at least at first. Ostensibly, whenever he would call, it would be because he urgently needed to show his latest page or two that he’d penciled, lettered, or inked. As the ghost writer of the material, for lack of a better term, my feedback was important to him. But after I offered my remarks, he’d tackle me, or more often I’d tackle him, and we’d tear one off. Then another, and another, and another. Until dawn’s early light.

After a while, though, I couldn’t remember the last time he had shown any new art to me, or when I had bothered to bring along my dream book, since he already had ample material for several comic book issues already. Our editorial meetings had quickly devolved into just tackling and tearing off.

Needless to say we never said “I love you” or “We’re going together” or “I need you, baby, baby” or any of that smoochy, lovey-dovey horseshit. We never even acknowledged the fact we were fucking, at least fucking another person; each of us was merely another animal to the other, a grunting, sweating carcass, coming then dozing off. And we were a couple of fuckers, that much was certain. We just let each other get our respective rocks off—in turn, simultaneously, or one after the other. You think you’re a perverted motherfucker? Let’s see if you can top this. I was utterly debasing, and utterly wonderful, and if not the best sex of my life, the thing most needful in my life at that time.

I had to help Chas along considerably at first, which I suppose gave it its novelty for me. He was one of those guys who had had a lot of experience with porn but relatively little experience with actual women. Which is not at all charming, but when you’re desperate, as I was, and not looking for anything deeper than a quick fix, you work with what you got. I had to coax him and do a lot of things I never had before, and I thought I had done it all. I should have charged by the hour.

He gifted me with garter belts and spiked heels and all kinds of things I would never have bought for myself, which was kind of sweet, although they were really mostly gifts for him. I even wore lipstick, eyeshadow, and rouge once or twice, which I never would have bothered to do for myself. It became a form of play acting, although I wondered, as all women who allow themselves to explore their repressed sexuality, whether or not I was a whore in some alternate reality. Or for that matter, in this one. In any case, I enjoyed leaving his apartment in the morning all tarted up, hoping to run into Peggy again just to shock her. Sadly, it never happened.

It was hard setting boundaries with Chas, because he’d always make a joke of it, a game of it. And it was playful, for the most part, at least on my end. Although I began to suspect that it meant more to Chas than he was letting on.

All of this was without drugs or alcohol, believe it or not. If it was warped, and it truly was, I chalked it up to my overworked, over-wracked brain, grad-student, teaching-assistant brain. My fellow grad student teaching assistants, I noticed, let off steam by compulsively going out to bars every night and getting smashed, or drinking and partying wildly on the weekends. I accomplished the same thing sober with lack of sleep and ecstatic—what I imagined to be tantric—sex. This in turn yielded dream visions even more vivid and terrible …

One time, Chas jokingly suggested we go upstairs and do a threesome with Peggy. I had never done a threesome, never had the desire; I could never even imagine the circumstances in which it would be possible. Chas was horrified when I was into it. We may as well have been drunk; we were as giddy as a couple of sailors as we ventured up the stairs, both of us buck naked except for my garter belt and fishnets, at three in the morning to knock on the Grosse Pointe gal’s apartment door. Chas got scared when he heard somebody answering the door and ran back downstairs.

Who answered the door but Marge, Peggy’s roommate who was also named Margaret, who sometimes waited tables when I worked at the Union Stripe across Woodward Avenue, in an oversized WWU T-shirt. I stood there for a moment, petrified, in my fishnets and garters—I’d left off the spiked heels so as to tippy-toe—as Marge rubbed her eyes sleepily.

“Oh, hi, Clarissa,” she said matter-of-factly. “Peggy’s not here. And I’m having my period—my cramps are real bad. Some other time, though.” She closed the door.

I never had known that about ol’ Marge. But I made a note.

***

I can honestly say I’ve never felt humiliated by anything I’ve ever done consensually to get another person off. That’s what sex is in my book, as opposed to masturbation: getting another person off. Sometimes, that means me doing things to a partner or allowing a partner do something to me that doesn’t directly afford me any please—to me, that’s just Sex 101 Common Sense.

But it quickly became clear that Chas really got off on stuff that made him feel superior, exalted. Like ejaculating outside my body. More specifically, on my body. And I began to realize Chas liked it all the more if, rather than saying, “Oh, yeah, baby, do it, do it,” I instead feign protest or even outrage. “You sick bastard, what is wrong with you?” I would say, even while lying there motionless and enduring it. I took it as a male-female grudge thing, not a racial thing. After all, I knew for a fact he liked to do the same kind of thing with Peggy, a white girl, and Chas no doubt enjoyed it all the more since she had hitherto seemed unattainable, out of reach. Peggy had complained about it to me and Avie right in the Medieval Court Café of the Detroit Museum of Arts, reporting she had promptly terminated their relationship immediately because of it. Avie chimed in and said Chas had wanted to do the same thing with her, but that she would never tolerate such blatant hostility to women. Avie can be so full of shit.

But I kind of understood it. Chas was a late bloomer like me. He had been a shy, skinny, introverted artist, particularly sensitive to rejection, the kind that would write “secret admirer” love letters to the objects of his affection in high school but be too tongue-tied to ask them out or to the prom. But after he’d gotten a few cartoons published in The Motor City Monitor, and particularly after his body started filling out, he had worked up enough confidence to approach the women that he found attractive, and, much to his amazement, he began having some luck. He discovered the Golden Rule that you don’t get anything unless you ask for it, and he became ever more bold in his requests. Only thing was, by the time he actually lost his virginity, he had built up a reservoir of resentment and wanted to ritually get back at all those desirable women he felt had to intimidated to approach, or had outright rejected him. He felt the need to express his contempt toward his consensual lovers.

***

I suspect Chas was lucky to have a creative outlet, else he might have become one of those street perverts who walk around in raincoats flashing people, or worse. He confessed to me at one point that he sometimes liked to take long walks around Detroit in the dead of night, when the streets were completely abandoned, and get off in some dark recess. I didn’t tell him he had this in common with me.

Understanding his need to be an immature bad boy actually made Chas easier to control, since afterward he always felt guilty. He was willing to go to extraordinary lengths to reciprocate, to make it up to me. He liked having me sit on his face, for example. This also was no surprise, since I’d stumbled upon him and Peggy performing that very act that one night in his apartment. He also enjoyed weird shower games in the shower, if you know what I mean. I got to pretend I was Dana in those situations. Of course, this wasn’t really a punishment since Chas enjoyed being humiliated too. Sex is an economy of humiliation for some people; it certainly was for Chas.

I wasn’t embarrassed about my relationship with Chas, at least not because of the sex, which was silly and laughable. For me it was like junk food, a midnight snack after bashing my brains on grad school. I wanted to keep it on the down-low because I didn’t want my sister finding out, because she’d know immediately the kind of unworthy sex it was. And it burned me up at first just knowing Peggy knew, and knowing that it bolstered her already low opinion of me, I felt. But I got my jollies, and my secret, sleazy, unspeakably dirty relationship with Chas fit my busy schedule. That perhaps was what was most important about it: it happened to be convenient. And although I didn’t run into Peggy on the way out of Chas’s apartment in the mornings, I got to liking having a cat-ate-the-canary smile on my face when we passed each other sometimes in the afternoons on campus.

I enjoyed the booty calls in the middle of the night—it was the kind of thrill more normal Megaheroes must have sublimated by going “On Patrol.” I was up late grading papers anyway; Letterman by that hour had already signed off, replaced by infomercials and then test patterns on my little black-and-white portable. I enjoyed the fresh air and six-block walk to Chas’s apartment after being sedentary all day. I liked seeing what he’d produced at the drawing board—ostensibly, that was why he had called, he was dying to show me. I even got to where I enjoyed the weird sex games, because it really wasn’t sex at all. In fact, it was some of the lousiest, dumbest sex every, and I’d have probably had a better time alone.

***

What was awkward was when Chas started “having feelings” for me. Good Lord. It began with little thank-you notes following a particularly smutty night, handwritten on photocopies of his latest pages left in my mailbox, or other little gifts he’d leave. That’s how Avie found out—one afternoon returning from school, she’d come upon a particularly graphic message Chas had left for me on some robot fight scene he’d penciled, confirming her suspicions that we were intimate. I had to tell Chas to chill out, and I guess I overdid it and hurt his feelings. Then, I had to make it up to him.

I began to notice him wanting to treat me more like a whore than a girlfriend, I mean even more than I permitted him to. Not only did he draw the Ms. Megaton Man avatar in more perilous and erotically demeaning situations, he also neglected to reciprocate after we performed some sex act that only gratified him. He would just kind of fall asleep, without even the courtesy of cuddling.

One time I figured I would get back at him. He called up one night and begged me to come over. I’d been drinking coffee all night, and even drank a bottle of pop on the way over for good measure. When I got to his apartment, I suggested we start in the shower, and we never did that. If he wanted shower games, I’d show him one. But instead of a turn-off, after we soaped up and rinsed off, he was so horny he did me three times before the entire building ran out of hot water.

I’d created a monster. But like always, I reasoned that if he ever really got rough or demanding with me, I could always beat him up if I had to. After all, I was still a megapowered Megahero. I hoped.

***

It was exactly the kind of relationship I wanted for the time being: something sleazy that I felt ambivalent about and could end without crocodile tears whenever I wanted. It carried me through the semester; more amazingly and it carried Chas through a complete, 36-page inked and lettered comic book story he called “Ms. Megatronica vs. the Garnookian Butt Worms of Rott,” very loosely based on my dream-visions. But at least the gal had my body type for a change.

When I came over to see it—in the daytime—a stack of manilla envelopes sat in a crisp stack on his kitchen table. They contained photocopies from the WWU print center and were already addressed to thirteen different comic book and magazine publishers. He showed me the original artwork for the completed story, too, and the big surprise there was how he signed his name now: Chase Bradford. He’d been Chuck originally, but we called him Chas; Chase was definitely more brash.

I said, “That’s great, Chas—I mean, Chase. I’m really proud of you.” Then, “We’re breaking up.”

“I know, Clarissa,” he said. “I haven’t been a very attentive lover.”

“We haven’t been lovers at all. Mostly we’ve just been masturbating together.”

“I know. There’s room for improvement. But I learned a lot from you.” I didn’t ask if he meant from illustrating my dreams or from our sleazy, late-night frolics. “I ran into Peggy and asked her out again. For some reason, she agreed.”

That’s funny, because I had been thinking about Marge. Maybe it could be double date.