When I was six years old, I bit a little girl on the cheek. Hard. I imagine that she screamed and that she cried. I don't remember. I recall swooping down like a great bird and sinking my teeth into the soft golden brown fuzz of a cheek that I think I thought was the most delicious thing I had ever seen attached to a human being.

I knew about love of the flesh.

I knew about carnal desires.

I did not recognize this as the earliest proof that I would grow up queer.

I don't think I got into any major trouble. We were in Philadelphia. On the Philadelphia. Asphalt and brittle grass. Recess. She was in kindergarten, I think. Five years old. She wouldn't talk to me or play with me or hug me or something. So I bit her. I flew down and took what I wanted. One taste of her soft ripe cheek.

There's a gap in the memory after that.

I don't even remember whether or not I broke the skin.

Maybe I just left her there (screaming or crying as she must have been) and ran off or maybe I heard the call and lined up near the door with the rest of the students, as if nothing had happened.

I remember the man, who (at least in my head) looked remarkably like my father. I remember this man's head (light brown) and his hair (reddish) and his glasses (dark brown) poking up from behind the narrow wall of students. He asked who had done this. Who had bitten this girl?

It is possible that I visualize every black man twenty or thirty years older than me as some sort of incarnation of my father. Except for the principal. He was something else, altogether.

I don't know how I made myself known. I don't know if I confessed, if I stepped out of line. If I admitted it. If I hid. Perhaps all of the other kids knew and moved away from me when the man spoke, not wishing to be caught in the wave of trouble we all imagined was coming. However it was, he addressed me harshly (with an unexpected undercurrent of soft)—we don't bite people. It's not okay to bite people.

Of course it wasn't. I knew that. I was six. I wasn't stupid.

I was much smarter, then.

Maybe I had to meet with the principal. A light-skinned black man with a short, short afro. My memory has made Cornel West of him. Forgive me. I am not as smart as I was then and my memory has never been brilliant.

The principal (Dr. Whatshisface) looked down at me from his side of the big scary desk. He was gentle and forgiving. I was one of the smartest kids in the school. My brain excited him, I think. I would be a doctor of something or other, if he played his cards right.

You get away with everything when you're young and brilliant and sweet.

I could have almost killed my mother and gone free.

Don’t think I didn't consider it.

And there was nothing superficial here, at this first school, to condemn me. I was not the only black kid in my grade as I would be in a few years, when we left the city. (The powers that be in my immediate family decided that I needed to leave West Philadelphia. They noticed that I had begun to speak with a Southern Accent. That I was picking up what they called "ghetto-ese." That this development would harm my brain, which must be protected at all costs. Such treatment and I wasn't even a genius!) We moved to the suburbs. There, the kids would marvel at my palms, how surprisingly (arbitrarily) peachy they are given how decidedly brown the rest of me still was. The teachers would marvel at my brain, how it seemed to function just as well as the brains of the pinky-peach students.

Ariana is quiet and pleasant. She sits still in class. She reads avidly. She gets along well with the other students. She does not like the cut and paste activities. She claims they do not challenge her sufficiently.

No, here I was a little brown face in a sea of little brown faces and I was not yet a known queer. I was generally good. Attentive in class. Well-behaved when I wasn't biting someone or stealing. (I did not steal nearly as often when I was in the suburbs. Why is that?)

Did I mention I was a young kleptomaniac?

From the time I was in the cradle.

I swear I couldn't help myself.

My mother tells me she would push my stroller through the grocery store and I would reach out and grab anything that caught my itty bitty little fancy. I would hide huge quantities of contraband beneath my blankets. I would grin. Such a happy child, I was. So content. So little fuss. So affectionate.

My mother would have to check the stroller every time we got to the cash register. Candy and cookie-cutters and pencils and tangerines and individual eggs and kumquats. She felt so embarrassed. Her daughter couldn't walk and she was already an outlaw.

The word 'polyamorist' was not in her vocabulary. She had no way of knowing how deviant I would become.

I was just such a good, smart little thing. In this country, people are prized for their beauty, their brains, or their bank accounts. Having no gifts in the financial department, and the verdict still out where my looks were concerned, having an over abundance of brain power (coupled with a pleasant disposition and a remarkable ability to keep quiet and sit without fidgeting) was a great redeemer.

My brainpower peaked somewhere in high school and began to plummet in college. I no longer qualified as 'good.' I had sex with many different men and women. Often at the same time. I stopped shaving. I started shaving again. I shaved when the spirit moved me. I clipped my formerly prized fingernails (my only officially Black vanity) so that they would be short and soft enough to slide smooth into my girlfriends. I stopped relaxing and pressing and curling my hair. I attended classes haphazardly. I drank tequila. I smoked marijuana. I never touched tobacco (except once—when I was learning to inhale for marijuana-smoking purposes). I stopped wearing underwear. And participating in mainstream media culture. I joined the Green Party. I voted for Nader, despite his comments about gonadal politics. I became agnostic. And then Buddhist (which is almost worse). And then a poet. A performance poet. Who wrote about sex and power and multiplicity and sex and joy and paradox and sex politics and sex. Queer, deviant, multicultural, pluralistic, feminist, multi-gendered, political sex. And performed these poems to audiences of all ages. I travelled and performed and wrote and travelled and performed and fucked all over the country and in other countries, too. I had thirty and forty and fifty year old lovers. I had lovers who couldn't buy alcohol. I jumped on the bed. I swallowed. I grabbed my lovers by the head. I sprouted a voice. I got in touch with my inner orgasm. I learned to come screaming. I learned to curse. I ate mushrooms. I experienced ecstasy. I went to sex clubs and sex parties. I participated in SM scenes. I ate mushrooms. I experienced ecstasy. I did unspeakable things for money. I spoke about them.

I was not an easy-to-swallow lesbian.

I was a loud, wild, polyamorous, politically active, multicultural, pansexual dyke.

Still, generally pleasant. Still mostly sweet. Not as smart as I used to be. I was not a Phd. I was a poem. The kind of poem you fuck yourself with every night and introduce to your mother as a real nice girl.

You get away with a lot when you're charming, when you're pleasant and sweet.