by Michelle Tea
One day Linda booked me a call with Novato Bob. All the tricks gave regular names, then some word to distinguish them from the roster of Bobs, Johns and Mikes. Linda gave me some vague disclaimer beforehand, like he was intense but harmless and she had seen him and all the girls had seen him. Novato Bob pinned me to the bed and held my head to the mattress. Don’t Do That, I snapped, and he snapped back, Come on, annoyed, and it makes sense that I don’t remember much of the call except that he was rough in a way that scared me. And I knew he wouldn’t hit me, just fuck me, and did it matter that he hated me while he did it? It’s not rape if I knew I was going to end up fucked when I walked in the room. And I did not stop the call, I took it because that essentially was my job, to take it, lie still until it was done, take my money and leave. I was waiting on the corner the next week for my boss to pick me up and I felt my throat go thick like I’d swallowed something big that stuck there and I knew I couldn’t go. I went home. It was early still so I climbed back in bed, alone, without Willa. I quit my job. I quit Willa too, eventually I did, because she was not in love with me and I was an artist, a lover, a lover of women, a warrior really, too noble to stick it out in a dead-end job ’til they saw fit to fire me.
4
Pride Weekend was the perfect weekend to leave a lover and hop right into a new one. The city was buzzing, and I was gliding up 18th Street with a brand new girl and a 40, while the June sun was still high and shining. Passing the bottle back and forth, snug in its wrinkled brown paper. I just love to be drunk in the daylight. Everything turns liquid and golden with me moving right through it. The air’s bright shimmer washed away the dead feeling I’d had since that last night with Willa, when she’d slammed her head against my plaster walls again and again, the awful dull thud of it louder than my own shrill voice sounding out the terms of our breakup. I hated the sight of her small body lurching toward the wall, it made me furious. Willa, Stop. My room was like a tight dark box, there was hardly room for air with all the terrible motion and mania, a crazy whirling like bad weather moving in fast. I didn’t understand. Willa loved me, but it was a friendly love we could keep between us while we both went off in search of wild crazy love. It was best for both of us—didn’t Willa want to fall in love? Each bash of her body up against the wall made me think of her scars, her diaries, all the things that made me think of her as too precious and fragile, the thing that sewed me to her, and here it was unfurling its awful pages into my bedroom and it made me want to kill her. Willa, Stop. It was so unnecessary. Not romantic. I was crying. Her boomerang face was too much a dark blur to see if she was too, but her voice was a warble. I Can’t Take This, I said and walked into the hall. It was so late, how could my roommates be sleeping through this? Fuck you! Willa cried, and that was it. Get Out! I screamed. I heard motion from behind Laurel’s door. Willa ran down the stairs. In her pajamas. Fuck you! she yelled again, crying. The door slammed and rattled. My room was still. Something should have been broken, there should be shards on the carpet or plaster dusting off the walls, but everything was fine. Like nothing had happened. Laurel’s door creaked open. Michelle? I went into her room and smoked with her in the dark, our bodies folded out the window, leaning over the empty street. She Was Slamming Her Head Into The Wall, I said. Laurel smoked. I didn’t know how I could go back into my room and sleep on that futon, everything vibrating with Willa. Her energy had reached an intensity capable of imprinting itself forever on the place, a ghost, Willa forever hurtling toward my wall. But the next day, it was gone. My room. Bits of everywhere I’d been so far sitting on the shelves, shriveled cactus bits from Tucson, a tiny sparkling geode from the Grand Canyon, broken bits of china from ships crashed off the coast of Provincetown and washed into the harbor. All I could see of Willa was the gigantic bag of thrift store socks she’d bought me, horrified at my tiny collection of five. A bright and jumbled pile, like Willa with her Crayola mohawk and mismatched clothes. I couldn’t think about her. I thought about the new girl. Her name was Iris.
Iris was the quiet girl on the bike outside the club everyone went to. I knew her roommates, sort of. I first met her a few weeks before ending it with Willa, on Harrison Avenue at three o’clock in the morning, with a neon sign blinking above our heads and people roaring out of the nearby alley on motorcycles. A little farther down the street was the steady hum of trucks and buses filling up at the diesel station on the corner. Iris was on her bicycle, the big wheels lifting her off the ground. She had her helmet on and she looked about eleven years old. Some kind of striped shirt, orangey stripes, and jeans. Then I saw her again the very next night, at a party Willa had brought me to. There she was again. I was on the back porch where Willa’s last girlfriend, a notorious drunk named Kitty, was smashing teacups on the wooden floor. I thought she was great. Iris’s roommates, who I was sitting with at a little table, thought she was obnoxious. Candice was like the head roommate, kind of cold I thought, critical and detached, with different-colored eyes, like David Bowie. She had lived in Georgia with Iris, and the two of them were gossiping about people I would never know, the women’s studies professor they had had a crush on, girls who were dumb or girls who were cool. They made no effort to include me, yet I couldn’t bring myself to leave the table. I just knew that if I could find the right entry into the conversation I could say something brilliant and captivate Iris. Can I Have A Cigarette? I asked Candice, and she nodded coolly and passed me her pack. Another teacup sailed above our heads as Kitty howled and stomped down the backstairs and into the party. Who is that? Candice asked, and kind of glared at me like I was responsible. Iris smiled, a little smile. She was pretty. Her face looked young. I ran into her later in the evening when I was raiding the hostess’s refrigerator. I had found a jar of pickles, and nothing is better when you’re really drunk and kind of dehydrated than a pickle. I think I was even shamefully stealing sips of the salty green juice. It seems like such a gross thing to enjoy, like beef jerky. There was Iris. Want A Pickle? I asked. Maybe she took one. I remember I kissed her hand. My seduction technique is best filed under Obvious. I told her to meet me the next day at the Bearded Lady for waffles and neither of us showed up. But she turned up a week later, part of the late-night gaggle of kids I was smuggling into the anarchist labor union that had forgotten to take away my keys before firing me so many months ago, for running away to Tucson and leaving the office unmanned. With a lack of Willa freeing up my time, I spent my evenings sneaking into the closed-up office building, which was above a strip club on Market, to use the xerox machine and the computers. First all by myself, chain-smoking and gazing out the windows at the esoteric glowing eyeballs and clouds on the Oddfellows Temple across the street, at the drunken brawls outside the check-cashing place on the corner, following with my eyes the saunters of ponytailed girls on their way to work at the peepshow downstairs. Later I got lonely and started throwing zine parties. The kids I invited would stand on the street six stories down, the lively corner of 7th and Market, and they would scream Revolution! and I would take the elevator downstairs and let them scurry in. It was really fun. After getting completely wired on coffee I would start in on wine, Rene Junot, six bucks for a wide bottle, or some squat green grenades of Mickey’s, or whiskey, or whatever people brought, and everyone who came would have to write something and it would get printed out on the computer and I would stick it all together with a gummy yellow glue stick and crank it out on the xerox machine.
The final time we did this Iris was there. She made me so nervous, as she sat at a glowing computer and hardly talked. I am always compelled to fling myself at these quiet girls whose quietness only makes me talk larger, talk faster and faster to fill up the nervous silence they seem to sit inside so comfortably. I would babble to Iris until I felt a warm flush rise and I felt like a jerk and settled back into my computer. Then Iris would say something simple and I would launch into another grand show and finally some more kids shouted Revolution! out on the street and I was saved. I think tha
t Iris presented herself to me as some kind of writer, or maybe I just made her into one, the way I had assumed for the first half of my life that my mother was a writer, simply because I loved her and identified with her and figured since I was a writer she would have to be one too. Iris did write a little. She wrote good. Her contribution to that night’s zine was a rant about how she hated her grandfather. She was inspired by the solemn portrait of the union’s grand martyr, Joe Hill, that hung above her computer, and she wrote about how her bourgeois grandfather probably hated Joe Hill and was glad that he’d been killed by The Man during the general strike long ago. I was impressed that Iris knew who Joe Hill was. I hadn’t. The only reason I got hired by the union, which kept only two paid employees, was that a dyke in the union who knew me from my Queer Nation/clinic defense/queer street patrol/AIDS outreach days in Boston had snuck me into the computer system as a five-year East Coast union organizer, and told all the old guys who ran the outfit a big fat lie about how I had successfully organized exotic dancers in Boston. I didn’t feel so bad about taking the job since I did want to be an anarchist labor union organizer and had big dreams of returning capitalism to the workers. But the union turned out to be nothing but a historical society of irritating gray-haired bureaucrats dedicated to preserving Joe Hill’s ashes, and little more. The ashes sat in a film canister inside a gold paper bag, locked up in a glass case. See That? I asked Iris. That’s Joe Hill. His Ashes Are In There. Once when I was really mad at the union for not letting me involve us with Food Not Bombs, I concocted a great plan of revenge. I would steal Joe Hill and take him on a road trip, free his restless, noble spirit from the gilded cage they had locked him in. I would take photos of him in front of famous statues and landmarks across the country and publish them in a zine about the sad state of anarchist labor unions today. I would steal the union’s membership roster and do a daily raffle in which some lucky worker won a pinch of Joe. I loved imagining the gritty bone and ash between my fingers as I dropped a pile of the man into an envelope and set him free. The best idea I never acted on.
Iris chose a really cool font for her anticapitalist tirade. It looked very handsome folded into the book and was my favorite page. Bobby wrote a funny bitch about the O.J. Simpson thing, Laurel wrote a love manifesto for a girl she had a crush on, George xeroxed his tongue and wrote about stealing from his job, and Suzanne wrote about waiting in line for food stamps. It was a great zine and it took us ’til six in the morning to finish it. I was just so blasted, moving around the office filled with cigarette smoke, collating the pages, and then boom the xerox machine ran out of ink and I went into some kind of mania, determined to finish producing this zine that we had put so much earnest love and creativity into. There didn’t seem to be any more ink cartridges. A bunch was actually on the shelf right above my head but I never looked up. Instead I found a plastic jug filled with the leftover toner of other dead ink cartridges, a fine black powder, some inches of it. I removed the spent cartridge from the humming machine, and I stabbed a good-sized hole into the plastic. I made a crappy funnel, and I poured in the recycled toner. I did this in the back room that served as a storage area for volumes and volumes of historical writings on socialist and anarchist labor politics, and also cardboard boxes full of t-shirts, which my friends stole. They were pretty cool shirts, they had black cats on the front and said An Injury to One Is an Injury to All. I was so bitter and disillusioned with the union I didn’t much care about the theft, and I took one as well. But in this back room was a little porcelain saucer of a sink, above which I transferred the toner, creating small but potent clouds of toxic black dust that settled in thick clumps to be washed into the bay. A bunch got on me, too, on the red calico dress I loved even though people said I looked like a Deadhead in it. I had chopped the dress up here and there to give it an edge, but it still looked kind of crunchy. I patched up the gash in the toner cartridge with masking tape, plugged it back into the machine and finished all the zines. The head of the union called me for weeks afterward, needing to “talk to me about something.” I never called him back. Ultimately he changed the locks and that was the end of the zine parties.
I thought maybe I would fall in love with Iris. She was new to San Francisco. Of course. Everyone was. She came from a little part of Georgia where she’d been constantly fighting the way you constantly have to fight when you’re queer in a small place, starting direct action groups, getting up in the middle of the night to vandalize the town, things like that. Iris had some good stories, but most important she was revved up for love. That Pride Weekend we went to a party up on someone’s roof. It was small, a group of girls sitting around on the pebbly tar paper drinking their small bottles and chatting. I had my big bottle and Iris close enough to give me shivers, and I was much too manic for such calmness. Nearby, thousands of dykes were convening to march through the city. It was exciting. The beer made me glow so I felt like a god, that powerful, up high on a roof with the city stretched out beneath me. We were cuddly, holding hands or walking with arms slung around each other like we were girlfriends already. We left the roof party and met up with a gang of girls in front of the gay cafe on 16th Street that wouldn’t let us use the bathroom. A big problem. Fucking elitist cafe. We were dykes, we had to pee. George had made long neon stickers that said Assimilationist and we were sticking them on the cafe windows, and also on any nice cars we came upon. There were also stickers that said Trash and Smelly Dyke and those got stuck on asses and t-shirts. The march took so long to get started. We were standing in the street at 18th and Castro surrounded on all sides by millions of lesbians, trapped. Everyone needed to pee or else needed to get more beer and you just couldn’t move. It was almost too much. Someone handed me a drum, a bucket on a rope, and I beat it with a wooden spatula. Iris was getting me winks of approval from friends and acquaintances. I showed her off like a new tattoo. She was awfully cute, and her southern voice drove me crazy. It sounded both tough and charming, and then there were her slinky blue eyes, and her big lips like a crimson pillow with a pearly corner of tooth poking out. She had that rakish look I die for, and when she opened her mouth, forget it. We were marching around, slapping on the fake drum. I could see Willa’s glowing head bobbing in the crowd up ahead. The need to avoid her perfectly tempered my bliss with drama. We were trying to be friends that weekend, but I couldn’t handle it. I’d think that I could and then whomph, right in the stomach. Why hadn’t she loved me the way I wanted her to? Had I given up too soon? It had been such a manic breakup, it almost felt like I’d imagined the whole thing. And there was a post-breakup law in effect that I couldn’t be affectionate with anyone in Willa’s presence until her adjustment period passed. This was understandable but also mean because she bartended at the only bar worth going to, so I might as well have stayed home.
The march wound its way back to a stage set up in the middle of the Castro, it was amazing. The night stayed warm, and all these dykes were jumping around in the street. Girls were performing on the stage, there was a fisting demonstration. A dramatic green-haired girl did a convulsive dance until she fell off the edge. I had my shirt off, I was sweaty, blitzed, everyone was. Girls were tugging down their pants and squatting to pee in the middle of everything. I had moved from beer to wine and back. I figured I could make out with Iris if Willa wasn’t paying attention and of course that got sloppy. I opened my eyes in the middle of a big tonguey one and Willa was standing right there. Naturally she acted like she didn’t care, why bother, everyone was having such a great time. I think she bummed a cigarette from me. I remember a highchair right in the middle of the street, and a really drunk woman locked in it, banging on the tray, making people feed her Coronas. The lesbians started to disperse, but we decided to take the party back to Iris’s house. We were looking for a cab to deliver us to the Mission, and there was Willa, kind of sulking, very drunk and wanting to come along. Well, Ok, If You Think That Would Be All Right For You. She was moping, quiet, her face wrinkling down
toward the ground. Well, do you want me to go? She was so indecisive, it drove me crazy. Listen, Do What You Want, But Make Sure You Can Deal With It. She climbed into the cab like a kid being taken to a hospital or her grandparents’, someplace awful. Then there was this strange woman in the cab with us, no one knew who she was, she just wanted to join us so we let her. She was older and had a long drunken story about her ex-lover and a Greyhound bus and how she had no place to go. I think once she opened her mouth we realized it was a mistake to let her come along. She had the driver stop at a store, where she jumped out and returned with more beer and a Hustler. She was showing us all the pictures and asking what we thought. Check her out, that one’s hot. She was like someone’s drunken father. At Iris’s we threw the magazine out the window while she was in the bathroom. Hey, where’s my Hustler? Laurel gave her a lecture about how Hustler was gross, not suitable dyke pornography. We all started arguing about politics and this woman was definitely the target. She was for all the Wrong Things. Willa slumped on a chair looking rather autistic. Eventually she got up and sat by herself in the hallway. People were looking to me for an explanation. I shrugged. She wasn’t my responsibility anymore. Someone finally called her a cab and she left without saying goodbye.
I spent the night at Iris’s. Her futon was beneath a windowsill that these pigeons lived on. They made loud cooing noises the whole night and I was enchanted. You Have Pigeons, I said. It was like being in the wilderness or something, sleeping beside this pack of loud birds. The awkwardness of not knowing someone’s body, I had no idea what to do. I shoved my fingers into her. You can do it harder, she said, and I did. These girls. I couldn’t believe I wasn’t hurting her. I remembered Petra, the last place my fist had been. The vagina is not a delicate place, I was learning this slowly. I worked my hand into Iris, who sucked and chewed on the inky red heart that marked the place my real heart churned. She was so intense. I feel like you’re squeezing my heart, she said. I pressed myself against her and bit her neck, my hand grasping. Things with Willa had been much more intellectual than sexual, so this was a nice switch.