She is pretty, tiny. College Street pretty, Bar Italia pretty, tight black pants and shoulder-length hair pretty, confident, sophisticated, city and sex pretty. Hide inside your fist tiny, ceramic figurine tiny, five-foot nothing in heels tiny. And she is walking past the laundromat window where I sit and wait and watch.

She is familiar. I have seen her exposed somehow. Unclothed before me, but not in my bed, not in her bed, not together. Naked in a picture, perhaps, in a magazine, or website, a television program or a movie, and now, here she is, lit by the afternoon sun - alive, real, striding with purpose.

She comes inside, moves past the industrial washers and I stare with lazy intent until I remember the who, where and why. It was fall of last year, in September, a small room called Holy Joe's, reading aloud from her book Lie With Me. She seemed tiny then, sitting, and now, as she checks the remaining time on her dryer, tinier in proportion to her bravery, her boldness, not because she wrote about sex - worse - desire, and wrote about it like that: "My elbows weakened. My mouth touched the floor. My ass moved up in the air like a dog." We listened as strangers, as priests, to her confession, not only, but admission. It was literature as erotica and vice-versa: "I felt like a lioness under her king. I wanted to look up and lick him, clean him and stroke him." The illicit blush of the voyeur denied by our invitation, as we stood or sat in dark corners, listening without comment.

Full Name: Tamara Faith Berger, with modest shoulders not meant to bear the weight of one name, much less three, nor the assumptions I project. Tamara Faith Berger is in the laundromat beside the chocolate factory east of my apartment, sparking my arrested, adolescent imagination. I must look away to avoid being caught mid-gaze.

It was fiction she read, the first time she had done so, the premiere an acknowledgment that the material was difficult to present publicly, an affirmation that erotica is better private, meant for bedtime peering, not dramatized in early evening, not in a room called Holy Joe's, and certainly not amplified through a mic and mixer.

Shy at first, but already after a few sentences emerged a cadence. She read with confidence as she pleaded - with the audience, with herself, with her new lover: "Having sex where I felt like I was drowning and he was floating over me with a life jacket laughing." We listened because we could do nothing else after "I knew all he wanted was sex from my mouth" was spoken.

How long did it take, that evening? Was it five or seven or ten minutes? Longer? Less? At the mid-point, air was still and stiff like the men. Words replaced oxygen with expectation and tension.

"Well..." This is all the host could say afterwards, when he hit the mic. For nothing more could be said, needed to be said, should be said, about the pretty, tiny woman with the pretty, tiny pink book filled with hard cocks, wet pussies and hot expulsions.

She exits the laundromat; re-enters a few minutes later, just as her clothes tumble, tumble, tumble, halt. She stuffs her shirts and pants and socks into a hockey bag.

Have I, once before, recently, used the same dryer, the same washer as she? Have our unmentionables shared the same dark, intimate sudsy space?

Probably not.

"There was this time when I went out by myself," she wrote in Lie With Me, "and I wasn't wearing any underwear."

 

Ryan Bigge has seen through paper and wire, loads.