Illustration by Lydia Sviatoslavsky
Every year through eighth grade you decree a new Top 2. Consecutive Golds and Silvers go to Jeannie Renardi and Cathy Regaldi, Truffaut-ian fillies flowing blond and brown manes.
But now, in eighth grade, behold the new gold: Supreme pert and perky kitten: Cheryl Perkins.
Oh. My. Fucking. God.
Her jaw-length black hair in a bob, swerving and curving, boobs budding blouse buttons under jumper, pleated skirt and knee socks, Cheryl Perkins anoints full-on emanations: Platonic Forms of Femigod Barbelo, Bryan Ferry’s (Roxy Music) “Mother of Pearl” (“just out of reach glowing very holy grail”), the sapphic “My Wife” pledges of affection in thousands of girl-to-girl Insta posts (“Obsessed!!”), and Goethe’s forever Faust finale: The Eternal-Feminine (Das Ewig-Weibliche)
And now, in the suburban twilight, after school, when the girls and nuns have left the playground, you and Cheryl Perkins play a nasty game of “tag.” It goes unsaid that this game is really about kissing and groping. And, when you accidentally-on-purpose bump into each other, and you cup Cheryl’s boobs, and you put your mouth on her mouth, a portal unlocks to Everliving Things.
That control game on the basketball blacktop? The part where you pin her arms back? Force forward her chest? That kiss, a full press? Her wriggle out of reach? Why and how does Cheryl Perkins’ skirted restraint-play gyrate into your sickass psyche’s future compulsions for hair and costumes? Like, why, exactly, do these images-to-sensations icon into the pagan-potency of sacramental sex?
Elbows gathered, clavicles pronounced, bob jutting adjacent to soft lips and balconied over boobs, now she is pinned. Now she taunts, kisses you back, twirls and squirms away, depositing inside you the delicious wound of desire.
Maybe it’s this: Mammalian urges to both prod and swaddle merge in that gettable girl in the middle of the playground. The thing about desire is it loses its oomph once the object gets got. What would Wile E. Coyote do, really, with cute little Road Runner is in his paws? Long after Cheryl Perkins is gone, her bob blurs and 8th grade breasts, strained within that blouse, ache and throb in you. They join your life-ride of half-exalted, half-cringe compulsions, dark but steadily pulsing. The bio-proto-algorithms of appetition drive desire by neuro-engagement images, including every advert, porno and movie you’ve seen. It’s like a brain playground battlefield, with “enshitified” impressions colonizing one side, and poet Percy Shelley’s Everlasting Universe of Things orgasming the other.
Look at the you-are-here map of your psyche:
Since 8th grade Cheryl Perkins is pinned there. Her bob pops its own Fuck-etype. It tangles thru a history of magazines, scenes and screens. Snow White claps and shakes her shingle for the Seven Pervs. Barbara Feldon’s Agent 99 smarts you with a flapper look to get you fapping. Lost girl Louise Brooks tips from tipsy to dipsomaniac, escorting a dark frisson of getable sex. Anna Karina makes ends meet in Godard’s Vivre sa Vie, while Besson’s The Professional debuts 12-year-old Natalie Portman coifed above coltish limbs, and 10 years later she goes shake-and-go bubblegum purple in that boring stripper flick Closer. Before and after getting cancelled, Camilla Cabello makes you weep with “There’s a you-shaped space in my bed,” and a bob-shaped space inside your head. Helmut Newton shoots Vivienne F. in a helmet of hair, black lingerie plus shiny white pumps that never fail to pump you up. A Dutch Boy is painted – and named – for whatever queer or trancing and trannying layers of supra-binary appeal you feel (Jared Leto could almost qualify). With “Come swish around my pretty punk,” some horny old WB Yeats poem pages Siouxsie Sioux’s angled Banshee look. It totally screams Joan of Arc, a heretic guided by God voices to armor-up males into holy battle. It swerves Madonna brunette for a Met Gala or two. Meanwhile, her doppelganger in dance bangers, Kyle Minogue, rocks a blunt bang lob (long bob) to match lush new lip fillers. Graphic novel photog Valentina shoots eros as an Italian bondage outlaw. Like you, Rhianna finds love in hopeless places with asymmetrical angles. Uma Thurman bumps blow, pulping and fictionally framing the jaw and mouth, while Nastassja Kinski sports blonde kinks in Paris, Texas. And then – ah! – there’s Posh Spice, who victoriously beckons with 34D high-profile implants below her jagged bangs, ultimately removing the silicone, because, as she confesses in peak cringe, “Trust Me, I Look Really Awful Naked,” which, perversely, only gets you harder with ardour.
Like, how does just a haircut so jolt? What future GF with such boobs fucks you in a bob? Through hoops of years, punkettes and arty pixies leap, loop and magnetically magnify as your Cheryl bobotype, plus Gothettes dark with bangs and the subspaces they imply.
From that childhood temptation you feel all templated Cheryls before and after, as Proust senses in The Shadow of Young Girls in Bloom, “leaping further inward, toward the place where I could see them inside me.”
I mean, Hell, when he first beholds her, Dante is nine and Beatrice eight. And rebel Jesuit Stephen Daedelus yelps inside, eyeing the wild angel girl on Sandymount, her lyrical seabird legs poised to fly from Dublin’s dead ends.
Cheryl’s shape fills your eyes, while her pupils, dilated to black moon pearl pools, and overflowing her riverbank bangs, give a gaze without shame. No Sister Bridget, rapping your wrists with a steel-edged ruler before your entire class (“You disgust me!”), nor Father McMurphy, mumble-praying the pagans away into feast days, can break the devotional pulse of your bliss-pained blood. Eyes lock in a quadrilateral look/lust as you hear that heartbeat – under the white shirts you both wear – chime a midnight Compline call to passion crucified in pleasure.
Full of grace, you exhale and you’re lifted, as our Lady of Guadalupe forever in your mind assumes the shape of cunt.
Holy Mary Immersion of Goo, pray me a sinner, now and at the hour of our wet little death, amen.
