by Michelle Tea
I made a friend on the Greyhound back to San Francisco. Tony from Texas. I didn’t ask for him, he chose me. He had long, permed hair and had been playing keyboard in a metal band before hopping the Greyhound. His girlfriend had just broken up with him, so he went to the McDonald’s where she worked, intending to kill himself in the men’s room, but then decided to go to California instead. He had twenty bucks and a bag of psycho-pharmaceuticals. He called them his happy pills. They were in a little brown paper bag, and he’d shake the bag and say, Let me know if you get stressed. I got happy pills. Every time the bus driver took a break Tony would hand me a cigarette. I didn’t even have to ask. Carltons. At one stop the driver announced there was a snack truck in case we were hungry. Oh Great, I said sarcastically, Skittles. Tony went and bought me two bags of Skittles. Tony, You Don’t Have Any Money! Take the Skittles, Michelle. He was my boyfriend. I thought about all the Edies and Tonys. I didn’t want to be anybody’s Petra. Or was I an Edie? I was tired. Tony had this great shirt, Bikers For Jesus. It had a big motorcycle and it said Pray to the Best or Die Like the Rest. I could have gotten him to give it to me. I thought about trading him my ACT UP shirt, since he was in San Francisco now. At the Greyhound terminal I put Tony on a bus to Haight Street and waved goodbye.
I saw Petra at The Stud, rolling her fists and shaking her clanging wallet chain to that Nine Inch Nails cover of that Rod Stewart song. Could she be wearing spurs on her boots? Was she that cool? I heaved a sigh. One of burden, not romance. Hey, Petra. I showed her my new tattoo. I Was In Tucson, I explained. Cool, she said. Maybe she hadn’t noticed I was gone. Her girlfriend was back from her vacation down under. She was running around the bar with the slave owner from the sauna. They both had these Pebbles Flintstone ponytails on top of their heads. I’m Tabitha, she said, accosting me at the bar. I just thought we should know each other. She had this big, plasticky smile. Or maybe it was genuine. Yeah, I said, and shook her extended hand. She lingered awkwardly for a minute, and left. She looked a little disappointed.
2
Maybe I should tell you some more about Gwynn, sad sad Gwynn, the tortured poet who did not come to Arizona with me. Gwynn was an alcoholic, or had been once, I wasn’t sure how the whole alcoholism, Twelve Step situation worked. Couldn’t you simply have alcoholic periods, when you are sad or reckless and drinking for pathetic reasons, and then you get past it and cheer up and can drink again because it’s so much fun to be drunk? Sobriety seemed a real stick-in-the-mud stance to take, but I guess drinking was a problem for Gwynn. It pushed her onto airplanes to follow different sad women from state to state. She had been to a few A.A. meetings in the Tenderloin, which just depressed her and increased her desire to drink, so she stopped showing up. Gwynn, she was always talking about wanting to be drunk and honestly I did want to encourage that, I wanted to go to a bar with her and let all the stuff sobriety pushed down be released so I could catch it in my palms and finally kiss her. She was just so sad. Melancholy was a fleshy wave permanently cresting on her face, she had to speak through it when she talked. I found her beautiful, but it only made her sadder to hear it. Gwynn liked women who were on the edge and dangerous or else really sad like herself, giving me an inferiority complex. I’d never been a drug addict or anorexic or even an alcoholic, never compulsively cut up my arms or puked secret after-dinner pukes. I’d been a prostitute for a little while, but that hadn’t been self-destructive enough to count. A row of scars laddered down Gwynn’s shoulder. She’d put them there herself. She’d trail her fingers up the scars making harp noises, and laugh. I wanted to take care of this woman. Get her to stop eating so much meat. Gwynn was very unhealthy. She smoked cigarettes in her apartment with all the windows shut until her cat stank like an ashtray.
Living right upstairs from my sad poet Gwynn was Justine, the older woman who had mangled Gwynn’s heart off and on for the past four years. I’m sure it was mutual, but only Gwynn got my sympathy. I didn’t know a lot about Justine, just that we shared the same birthday, a good omen, and that she sang in the choir of a progressive church, which I thought was inexcusably weird. It took me a while to realize how epic their affair had been. Gwynn didn’t talk about it much. The stories she told were always about the others, the drinkers she stalked at parties and begged to run away with her, to head for Nevada in her black and shiny VW Bug that really did look like a bug. Being a poet, Gwynn told beautiful stories about these unstable women. I would sit and listen and regret being so normal and well-adjusted, unable to be the challenge she seemed to need to keep her love life exciting. It was a doomed crush with some nice moments. We went to the movies once, we saw The Piano and hated it, cringed through the whole exquisitely shot thing mumbling no oh no oh please don’t make her fall in love with the rapist. We drove out of San Francisco to the Serramonte Mall on the freeway because she was craving an Orange Julius. I got one too, but it was a big letdown. I didn’t remember them as tasting so much like Creamsicles and I really hated Creamsicles. Gwynn ate an Orange Julius hot dog loaded up with so much garbage, I wondered if it was even vegetarian to kiss her. That trip to the mall was the first time I ever saw a Hot Dog on a Stick stand at the food court, and I gazed in horror at the high school girls who worked there, the towering striped hats that were their uniform. There was something really obscene about them jumping up and down on the old-fashioned lemonade press. Gwynn told me about how she tried to get a job at Hot Dog on a Stick when she was a teenager in southern California, but they wouldn’t hire her because she wasn’t slutty enough. We went to the surreal candy store where tubes of sickeningly bright candies cascaded down the walls and I bought a little bag of really toxic gum, blue gum and green gum, incredibly sour. It raised your taste buds and made you wonder if your tongue was bleeding. We would chew a piece six or seven times then spit it out the car window and try a new one.
We were in Gwynn’s Bug the night I told her I liked her. I Have A Crush On You, I said, and bit her arm. Oh, Michelle, she said sadly. She was especially depressed that night, driving us aimlessly around San Francisco until inspiration struck and she decided to take me to Pacific Heights to see where Danielle Steel lived. I had been told that Danielle Steel was invented by a bunch of heterosexual men who actually wrote those melodramatic books my mother and aunts loved. But Gwynn insisted she existed. No, she’s real, she lives in this big house right around here somewhere, she said as we wound around the huge, expensive homes with floodlights and professional landscaping. I wanted to ring Danielle Steele’s doorbell and tell her to stop oppressing my mother, but we couldn’t find her house and I was starting to feel sick because I had forgotten to eat that day, so we went back to Gwynn’s apartment and she fixed me beans with rice that weren’t really cooked but I ate it all anyway because I was starving.
So the crush withered and died the way things that aren’t being fed usually do. We became friends, good poet-friends, and one day I climbed the paved hills to her home for a visit, hazy and dejected because I had started the cycle of unrequited love anew, with a different sad poet, Willa, who also lived on Haight Street. Gwynn had a present for me, a t-shirt with a glitter decal of Yoda from Star Wars. Do you really like it? I had a dream you didn’t like it at all. Yes, I Like It. I Love It. It was a baseball shirt with blue sleeves down to my elbows. I wore shirts like this in junior high, and then in high school worked in a shop at the mall making them, searing names and who-loves-whos onto the backs of t-shirts with this steamy huge machine that melted the white makeup I wore on my face, ’cause I was goth. I thought it was so you, she said, pulling up a chair. Gwynn had lawn furniture in her kitchen. I was sitting in this metal chair painted white, it looked like she stole it from an outdoor cafe. The ashtray cat was there, playing with a fake mouse with real animal fur glued to it, batting it under the radiator then smashing her feline skull trying to dig it back out. Gwynn told me about a wedding she’d gone to in Sacramento the previous weekend, and how she had had sex in the shower with the bride. And
then the bridesmaids jumped in. They were all straight, all strippers, she said. It was one of those straight parties with a lot of weird sexual energy. Ever been to one of those? I Can’t Believe You Had Sex With The Bride! It wasn’t really sex, we were just groping. And then the phone rang as we talked and it was the bride and she wanted Gwynn to take her to the beach. Oh, I wanted one of Gwynn’s cigarettes so badly and she wouldn’t give one to me. Winston’s are what my dead grandmother smoked. I loved her so much, Aquarian like me, big round glasses she wore even while swimming, a gauzy kerchief tied under her chin to keep the chlorine off her hair. She took us south from Boston every summer, a long, hot ride to Disney World via the swampy trailer parks our Louisiana relatives lived in. My jovial grandfather, tearing over state lines, and Nana, who didn’t know how to drive, clutching the dash like she was trapped on a carnival ride. Me and my little sister fighting sweaty in the back seat until our grandmother snaked her talon-tipped fingers our way, pinching up a bit of little girl leg skin to shut us up. She’d buy cartons of Winston’s for cheap at Carolina gas stations and I’d steal a pack to smoke in the bathroom at Stuckey’s.
Come On Gwynn, Just One. No, she said with that big sad face. You said you weren’t gonna smoke. It was true. I wasn’t going to smoke or drink or eat dairy or have sex, and I wasn’t going to go visit Willa, who was only a block or two up the street. Willa, who did not love me. I asked Gwynn if it was bad to keep with a relationship that had you in love with someone who didn’t love you back and she said yes. She was trying to be supportive, holding out on me with the cigarettes and telling me I shouldn’t walk up the street to see the girl. Everything inside me felt chemical. Nicotine blood pushing me at the cigarettes. Phenylethylamine pushing me out of Gwynn’s house to Willa, phenylethylamine being the neurotransmitter your body produces when you’re in love, making you chase down the object of your desire because the mere sight of her activates the chemical and gets you high. That’s what Willa told me. She was so brainy, it’s why I loved her. She also told me I didn’t trigger her phenylethylamine. And there I was in withdrawal, thinking, she’s just up the street, I’d only stay a minute. That’s why I took Gwynn’s bike that day, so I could change my life and stay away from Willa. Gwynn didn’t want it anymore, her lungs couldn’t pull it up the hills to her home. It was a black one-speed, a zillion years old with foot brakes and a big grated basket. Ok, I’ll Take It. I thought it would help me get healthy since I’d pledged not to smoke or drink or do much of anything anymore. And I could ride with Dykes on Bicycles in the parade. And I couldn’t go see Willa, ’cause there was no way in hell I could pump that relic up the hill to her house. I dragged it out of Gwynn’s apartment and coasted home. It was fun being on a bicycle in San Francisco, cutting across Market Street to my home in the Mission. I took it by this bookstore to visit my friend Tatiana at work. She loved my new bike. She pedaled it up and down the street wishing she owned it. I was so sad that day. My heart was trying to climb from my body. Tatiana was sad too. She was with a woman who’d been straight her whole life and just couldn’t fall in love with a girl. Are You In Love With Her? Yeah. That Sucks. Let’s make up rumors about each other and spread them all over town. I made up a great one about her answering a suspicious help-wanted ad and it turning out to be an assistant-in-training position with a dyke bounty hunter. You know, a gun for hire. A killer. Everyone believed it because Tatiana’s kind of psycho and would maybe take a job like that. She told people that I was flying to Los Angeles to lead a feminist action protesting The Love Connection. That’s So Stupid, I told her when I saw her again.
Oh, and then the bike got stolen. I rode it to work once and it made me feel like I’d swallowed fire. I’d been keeping it in the back hall because it was too heavy to be lifted up the stairs like some lightweight mountain bike. Then the alcoholic guy downstairs who lined his windows with empty vodka bottles fell down during a bad drunk and got shipped to the hospital. When he came home, he had a scab on his forehead and a wheelchair that could only be wheeled out the back hall so the bike had to go. It wasn’t important to me, the bike, and it did not keep me away from Willa. So I didn’t feel I owed it anything, and I wasn’t about to buy a bike lock. I pedaled it over to my friend George’s house on Sycamore and left it parked on his stairs behind the tall locked gate. George was one of the first kids I ever met in San Francisco, at a protest in front of a Baptist church where that reverend who made The Gay Agenda video and said gay people eat poop was cowering inside. Outside, me and George and bunches of other queers blocked traffic, got shoved around by unsympathetic dyke cops, pounded on the church doors and screamed Nazi! Someone wrenched the dreaded american flag from the flagpole and ran a happy homo rainbow flag up instead. George and I were both exhausted by activism, it was the last action we’d go to for a long while and probably the last time we submitted to chanting, ever. We had lost our idealism, but gained a friendship. Willa said I wanted the bike to get stolen or else why would I leave it on Sycamore, where George’s own bike was stolen by the Stolen Bike Ring that lurked on the corner. She said it was like how I call in sick a lot when I want a job to fire me. That wasn’t true. I didn’t want the bike stolen. I just didn’t care if it was. I only cared later when I was tripping on mushrooms and this girl Iris said, You know, I really loved that bike, I knew it was going to get stolen and I just loved it. I thought about stealing it myself but then I thought that would be weird. Oh Iris, you should have. Now it’s gone forever. If any of you ever see me treating something badly, carelessly, you can take it. Honest, it’s yours.
3
I was trying to get fired from my job at the courier company. I was doing it for Willa. It was incredible, the effort it took. My entire history of employment, starting back at the fluorescent-lit supermarket where I swished, Catholic-school-skirted, through the sawdusted aisles to collect my drawer and insert it into my register with the proud purpose of one who has never worked before, has always seemed full of horribly precarious arrangements. In my heart I knew I wasn’t cut out for it, employment. I was irresponsible, had no work ethic, was raised by parents who called in sick regular as weekends, and it was only a matter of time until I made The Big Fuck-Up and got canned. But this job would just not fire me. The courier company used cars, not bikes. I sat at a computer and took orders from different financial district companies, occasionally deleting calls from companies I disagreed with politically. I was flat on my futon with the girl I loved with a fierce and holy love, I had the phone at my ear and in my weakest tone possible was explaining to my boss why I couldn’t come in. I was really sick. Michelle, you have got to come in. I had just done this last week, probably the week before. Your job is seriously in jeopardy if you don’t show up. Well . . . Ok, I said, hurt. What if I really had been sick? They didn’t know. I’m On My Way, I said, and rolled back over to curl around Willa. She was this thing, this marvelous thing too good for this world that had tortured and tormented her, locked her up in stale institutions and driven her to slice up her skin, run barefoot through New England snow ’til her feet were dead slabs of meat from the freezer. She was my job. I didn’t have time for two. Are you going to work? she asked, and I pressed my cheek to her scalp’s clammy stubble. Her neon mohawk curled up from her crown like something from a Dr. Seuss book. No, I was not going to work. I was an artist, a lover, a lover of women, of the oppressed and downtrodden, a warrior really. I should have been somewhere leading an armed revolution in the name of love and no, I was not going to work. Willa didn’t work. I mean, she did, but it’s a stretch to call it work. She bartended at a dyke bar a few nights a week, drank free beer, and bummed all her cigarettes. People paid three bucks at the door to have the same experience she was having at her job. All week she was free, writing angsty brilliant poems, drawing comic books, painting gigantic painful pictures, you know, living. I wanted to live. With my tortured tormented girlfriend who, incidentally, still forbade me to refer to her as my “girlfriend” and was prett
y sure that she would never fall in love with me, although she did think she would fall in love again, sometime in the future. I had ceased to care. My love for her was religious, it was patriotic; like god or country it was something I pledged myself to in service of something huge and perfect that I was honored to have anything to do with. Our sex was adolescent, shy and blanketed, done through layers of flannel pajamas that rarely came off. In a very Catholic way I felt this made it more special, reaching out to the pile of cloth that was her body and pushing deeper, finding the sharp jutting bone of her hip or the softer ball of her breast. She was a message, a coded message to be deciphered with careful intelligence. With time I would understand all of her and she would love me passionately, but that would never happen so long as I had to pull myself away from her every 8:00 a.m., leaving her fully clothed and sleeping, to wake into the day without me.