Riding in Vans With Lesbians

Ariel Levy's article in this week's New Yorker regarding a nomadic band of badass van-driving separatist 70's lesbians known as the Van Dykes was great by any measure, but it almost made me cry.  Why?  Because I have had the fleeting, sometimes frustrating pleasure of knowing a lesbian with a van.  Well, a minivan: blue Dodge Caravan, fake wood paneling, creepy doll parts superglued to the dashboard, a mattress where the seats should be.  A musty dirty-foot smell poorly disguised with Bath & Bodyworks strawberry-kiwi body spray and Ani on the stereo, bitch!   You know the drill.  If you don't you should.  Some of the nicest times of my life were spent in a minivan with all of those things.

I met S. during my gloomy freshman year of college, when I lived in a picturesque but lonely room in a gingerbread house in which no one would visit me because it was at the bottom of a giant hill.  S. was was never my best friend or anything, but she was magnetic and the ringleader of the tight-knit circle of girls with whom I had thrown in my lot, so we ended up hanging out all the time. She was always spearheading some activity that no one else would have ever considered.

She had a van.  You weren't really allowed to have a car as a freshman, but S. had been forced to bring her van to school because she needed it in order to leave campus every weekend to attend Ani shows.  Since the school didn't grant special Ani DiFranco parking permits, S had to park in the scary-posh neighborhood that engulfs Sarah Lawrence's (also scary-posh) campus.  One afternoon I was sitting in my lonely room, probably feeling sorry for myself, when I heard honking, looked out the window and saw S.'s Caravan outside.  It had been freshly decorated: where before it had been a staid navy, it was now spray-painted with neon swirlies, womyn symbols, and, in giant pink letters, the words LESBO SEX.  It took me about two seconds to make it into out of my room and into the back of the van where a gang of girls was already sprawled on the mattress drinking beer, with S. in the driver's seat as the cheerful pilot.  I don't remember where we went that day-- probably nowhere in particular-- but after that paint job S. was always getting mean notes on her windshield from the people in front of whose giant Tudor mansions she parked.
 
We were constantly driving around in that van-- not just me and S, cause like I say, we weren't really solo friends like that-- but her and me and The Girls and often whoever I was dating.  We went to the diner what seemed like every night, and S. would order weird off-menu vegan meals cobbled together from various substitutions.  ("Can I get a burger but with extra lettuce instead of buns, no mayonnaise, extra ketchup and pico de gallo instead of beef?")  She was always taking us to some thrift store or another in a series of down-at-the-heels suburbs with names like Rompompano so she could buy toy pianos or whatever for her latest art project.  The best time we barely went anywhere-- we'd gotten all this beer and toffuti and kosher marshmallows and stuff for a picnic but there was a huge thunderstorm so we just parked by the side of the road and all crammed into the back of the lesbo sex van and got wasted and discovered that kosher marshmallows don't really compare to the regular kind.  I mean, it wasn't that exciting; it was just nice.

S. got over her Ani phase and started painting.  She stopped wearing broomstick skirts and started wearing white pants and old t-shirts with lacy Victorian frills sewn into the collars so that they buttoned up to her chin.  She took a year off and went to Texas, where she got into synchronized swimming.  She was always telling you about her latest scheme with these wide eyes and an incredulous shit-eating grin, basically daring you to believe her.  She punctuated everything with a gargly cartoon laugh. 

She could be moody and unpredictable, but she was always funny, even when she was being an asshole.  One time she got mad about something and superglued everything on her roommate's desk into place.  Well, that was funny to me. 

Eventually S. got a dog named Vandal who everyone hated.  She had adopted him as a mangy puppy from a homeless man she met over a summer when she'd organized a traveling lesbian circus.  She named the dog Vandal but addressed him as Wanda, which seemed appropriate-- he identifies as a Wanda, she explained.  I thought it was more likely he identified as a monster; he was always trying to eat people.  Everyone hated that fucking dog.  On top of being crazy and scary, he was also a racist.  On top of being racist, he liked to shit indoors for no other reason than to piss everyone off.  Really, he was much too skittish, aggressive and carnivorous for the undergraduate lifestyle.  Wanda had to be on the move or he would just have to eat someone, which only fed into S.'s already-ballooning wanderlust.  With Wanda around, S. had someone to ride shotgun and didn't need anyone else.  She seemed to have grown bored of people anyway-- or maybe just of me. 

I still saw the van a lot, but only when she stopped to roll down the window and chat on her way to some solitary destination.  She had become obsessed with abandoned buildings and had taken up squatting in this old empty mansion in a hidden part of town before Hollywood kicked her out they could use it to shoot Mona Lisa Smile.  After that, S. was even more distant.  But I was all wrapped up in my own stuff too, and, anyway, we were still friends and everything.  Sometimes we went to Wendy's after art history class (she got fries or maybe she had stopped being vegan by then; I can't remember) but  those occasions grew few and far between.  We fell out mostly out of touch after college, which was something I regretted after I got dumped by someone I thought I was in love with and considered taking up nomadicism myself.  I was hoping to hitch a ride, but I didn't know how to summon the van anymore.   

Last time I saw S., she'd blown into New York for about eighteen hours.  It was never easy making plans with her; we both had this thing about cell phones and she always had a packed itinerary and not much time.  On the rare occasions that she appeared it was always like "meet me at this warehouse at 2 in the morning and bring beer."  So I met her at 2 in the morning a party in a warehouse in the middle of Brooklyn where a nude man in his fifties wandered aimlessly amidst a crowd of twentysomethings.  The music was really loud and S. and I had to shout to hear each other, but it didn't matter, she still made me laugh.  She was wearing some crazy outfit but I can't remember what.  She might have been had a fake moustache fashioned from the real hair on her head; she did that a lot.  We talked for a couple hours.  I haven't heard from her since.

A girl with a van has places to go.  She has people to see.  You can be friends with a girl with a van, you can ride shotgun and sing along to Ani on the stereo.  It is very easy to fall in love with a girl with a van, even if there are more than a few reasons a relationship would never work.  From the passenger's seat of a girl's van, windows rolled down, you always know for sure that, in the end-- probably sometime soon-- you'll be standing in an empty parking lot waving goodbye as it speeds out of there on the way to some dyke paradise that can only be seen from the top of a pyramid, and that if it ever rolls back into town its driver will have another name and a new tattoo.