by Bill Noble
(11/18/03)

Red Devil Lounge, San Francisco, November 18, 2003.

Charlie-girl -- without whose steady set-up work the night would never have happened -- is shiny and vinyl in a red-devil suit, complete with barbed tail and li’l red horns: blonde-tressed, willowy, six feet tall, and utterly beyond gender. Charlie is the first person we meet as we enter the Red Devil Lounge, collecting our five bucks and offering us raffle tickets.

The noise of San Francisco’s Polk Street fades as we venture further into the Red Devil. On stage, Rachael Sage, of Lilith Fair fame, is in the middle of a sound check for her performance later in the evening, music cascading out of her keyboard, her voice darting and soaring. Chairs are being tumbled off tables, tables rushed into place all over the floor. The bartender is stacking glasses and wiping down the bar. My sweetie stands r egally in the middle of the hubbub, wearing a magnificent floor-length velvet-and-gossamer...something. Untie those three bows, she whispers, and it falls completely off me. Through the patterned transparency you can see clearly that, underneath, there is nothing whatsoever but a beautiful woman.

Our performers arrive, volunteers all, along with a stream of friends, poetry fans, gender activists, book people and eroto-maniacs. A sparkly woman from Chapel Hill, North Carolina has come to see the "real San Francisco." Michael Rosen, the famed erotic photographer, drifts in, as does Catherine Rose, a grinny imp determined to change the world one lapdance at a time.

I say a few words to the crowd about Clean Sheets, our fifth anniversary, and the raffle, and then Greg Wharton, the publisher of Suspect Thoughts Press, climbs onstage to pull us into a torrid story about frenzied sex and true-love-lost, from his collection Johnny Was & Other Tall Tales. At one point, the narrator, in a frenzy of gluttonous foreplay, dresses his lover’s cock as a submarine sandwich. The applause when Greg finishes is long and loud.

Next up is poet Jennie Orvino. She reads a series of poems about lovemaking as worship, and oral sex, and violence as a bewildered substitute for touch. With her curly gray hair caught by the stage lights and her breathy, flesh-and-blood metaphors fired straight into our souls, there isn’t a man or woman in the house who wouldn’t surrender.

Have you ever heard Juba Kalamka? Compact, cocoa-skinned and dreadlocked, soft-eyed, he feels cuddly and reassuring -- until he begins to read. He’s hip-hop. He’s rap, and slam. Sometimes his poems are half sung, and sometimes a Kalashnikov barrage that overturns your chair and knocks the air clean out of you. He’s black, and he’s bisexual, and he’s militantly polyamorous (the head of a worldwide organization, he says, that includes, oh, five or six guys). He takes no prisoners, and he tells the truth.

Then, Tarin Towers. She comes on like a forty-foot silo of popcorn, ready to pop. She launches at freight-train speed into a reminiscence of parties and psychedelics and tumbling lovers of every imaginable gender. Two tufts of frosted hair spout from either side of her head. Her hands blur. Her head tosses. We laugh and gasp and do our desperate damnedest to keep up. This Pushcart prize winner is performing next week at Spanganga, and I’m going!

I’m supposed to follow Tarin. Sheeesh. I offer gentler fare than the last two readers, a collage of poems and short stories. I read a long narrative poem called "I Fell in Love with Your Puss First," and see blushes where I never would have expected them (though I might secretly have hoped). I finish, glowing.

Finally, Ian Philips takes the stage. Ian is Greg Wharton’s life-partner and a Lambda Award-winning writer, expansive and funny where Greg is slender and contained. He reads from his collection Satyriasis: Literotica², a sort of Roger Zelazny meets Harry Lauder gay fairy tale, told in a straitlaced Scotty-from-Star-Trek voice that has everyone roaring until we ache. We raise our glasses to him. The applause seems to mean "More!"

Charlie-girl and I conduct the raffle, and more than half the audience wins something: books, a magazine collection, a couple of CDs...and an erotic dance class with Catherine.

Everyone orders up another drink, and Rachael Sage takes over the stage in snakeskin boots, sequined chaps, and the wink of body glitter. Stephanie, her cellist, is as wistful and low-key as Rachael is grand. Their music fills the room. It fills us. It overflows.

Clean Sheets is five years old, and the evening has just begun.

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