Possibly The Fourth Chapter, Or Not, But Definitely A Response To The Comment: ‘Oh, It Must Be So Much Easier Dating Women’

by Rajkhet Dirzhud-Rashid

A friend and I were chatting the other day. I think it was the same one who said she thought it must be great to be bisexual because dating women had to be easier than dating men. I started to remember some of the more interesting situations I’ve been in. There were times in my early (and recent) years when dating women was not only not better but at times far more insane than some of the adventures I’ve had with men.

The first situation that comes to mind is my first girlfriend (I’ll also tell you why I don’t drink anymore). It was around this time of the year, the time I always think of whenever I see a rust colored corduroy jacket or drink mulled apple cider. I was just out of the closet. I was with the girl who not only became my first girlfriend but who probably started the series of nut jobs that came after her. She was fifteen, an injectable drug addict (I think it might have been meth, but I’m not sure, this was the seventies after all) and a complete slut. The girl was actually named as the ‘mascot’ of her apartment building. I guess she’d done them all, but a guy who had slept with both of us separately told me ‘you’re so much better than her, she just lays there’. Ah well, none of that kept me from kissing her. It was my first ‘girl kiss’ in the bathroom with the lights off in one of her friend’s apartments. No, I don’t remember who or any other details except we turned on the lights, giggled at how we looked and acted like puppies in love after that. This was until her addiction got much worse, which might be how we ended up in some guy’s place with a bunch of biker dudes, all of us high and drunk, our male friends having left her and me for wherever (never did find out where they went). Someone decided to turn off the lights and this Eric the Red looking guy started throwing a hatchet back and forth. Really, a hatchet, folks, in the freaking dark. We all giggled, then the lights were turned back on; we got higher on pot with no harm done. That story got me a pat on the arm and an ‘I’m glad you’ve given all that up’ when I told her I don’t do pot anymore. Well, my fifteen-year-old tramp/girlfriend went her way, I went back home and that was that, for then.

Then, after my divorce from my daughter’s dad, husband number one, I met Carol (I can use her name because that was a long time ago and I’m pretty certain she’ll never read this) at the one Gay bar in Joliet, Illinois. I took her home, both of us pretty drunk (though I remember her being a lot more wasted than me), and tried to please her with what little technique I had at the time. She wanted more but let’s just say certain places did not smell appealing so I didn’t go there. After that night, one afternoon I was home in the apartment I now occupied alone, sans the soon-to-be-ex-husband and this Amazonian dyke showed up at my door. She asked me if I was sleeping with Carol (her girlfriend), and swallowing my fear (I thought I was dead meat for sure), I answered ‘yes’. She didn’t hit me, but stormed off, which actually scared me more. That wasn’t the end of the story, as she had me confront her cheating girlfriend, in front of their two kids, along with her, the cheated on girlfriend. The look on Carol’s face when she saw me will stay with me forever. Nothing like being busted, dead to rights, in front of your family, be you dyke or dude. I never heard what happened but I stopped picking up women in bars and moved to Chicago. That’s where I ended up in a triangle with a butch dyke and a woman I didn’t even know was a dyke. Now there was an interesting confrontation, as ‘woman I didn’t know was gay’ found out I was hitting on her ‘honey’ and told me in no uncertain terms to ‘back off, or else’. Later, there’d be the two crazy, bitch Scorpio chicks, one of which nearly killed one of my cats, thus making me throw her, in her wheelchair no less, out in the pouring rain. Hey, threaten me, I might kick your ass, threaten my animals, you’re in the rain, in the middle of the night in your wheelchair.

So, that and a few other stories, like the time I brought this group of Iranian students, when I was volunteering with this public radio station in Houston, into the station, because I had this wild crush on the hot girl leader of the group (who never even so much as hugged me), and the time I left my register at a Bartels in Houston (Eckerd Drugs), to chase after the ‘woman of my dreams’ shows that no, being bi isn’t necessarily better. Interesting, frustrating at times (ever have your best female friend steal your hot, French Canadian girlfriend right under your nose?) and at times heartbreaking. Like the time I broke up with a woman I’d asked to marry me, over her voice mail, because she wouldn’t talk to me and I just had to get free of her. Yeah, over her voice mail. This, I shamelessly tell you.