by Michelle Tea
We were in the lower Haight, the dark corner of Haight and Filmore and ahead was the shitty little dive bar that allowed dykes to plow in each Sunday night, fuck in the bathrooms, pierce and sew their pussy lips on a makeshift stage, all kinds of things going on. Spankings, girls peeling their clothes off on top of the bar. Are You Sure You Want To Come In? Iris and Laurel shrugged. It was important, but it didn’t really matter. We pushed into the bar and found it empty, with that cute rocker DJ with the black hair heaving milk crates full of records toward the front. Suzanne was there, and Willa was clearing glasses from tables. Hi, We’re On Drugs, I told her. Oh, she smiled this great smile. She didn’t care that I was hanging out with Iris, and that was nice. She was a Libra, pretty detached although she had jealous moments, like the day before when she discovered that the box of latex gloves beside my bed was empty. Did you use them all with Iris? she cried. How many times did you guys fuck, like, the whole time? Not A Lot, I said truthfully.
We left the bar, and our whole bunch walked over to Duboce Park. Suzanne was wearing a wig, a ratty brown and yellow bouffant with a tattered pink bow fixed to the middle. It was pretty great, the Whiskey Wig, we called it. To take a hit of the whiskey you had to wear the wig. We sat on the ground by the swing set and passed the bottle and the hair around, talked into my tape recorder about, you know, childhood teachers who’d hit us or funny stories of being too drunk. Laurel had a great story about smoking crack in an abandoned barber shop with this guy who almost raped her. Everyone had a couple big stories that kind of defined them, and sitting around the dark park, the dead subway tunnel gaping behind us like part of a big face, the shady boys skirting by our small group, checking us out, it was the moment to deliver your stories. Laurel had smoked crack and had been a speed freak plus had grown up poor in Maine picking potatoes with a crazy mother. Willa had been institutionalized and had parents she called “educated poor” and her dad was a minister. Iris was from the South, where she was persecuted in high school and put on Prozac and had a tumultuous affair with this really controlling girl who brought her to California. Suzanne was the most mysterious, but she had been a heroin addict and used to hit her girlfriend. I of course had been a prostitute, and had a girlfriend go straight on me and a peeping tom stepfather. That was my story. Laurel got on a swing and swung really high, tilting her body backward as she zoomed up. If she had had hair on her head it would have trailed on the ground but Laurel was bald. We were all bald or slowly recovering from recent baldness. It looks like death! she howled as she rushed upside down. It looks like skulls! I tried it. The oddly lit sand rolled in curves and shadows and did look like skulls. Willa wanted us to have sweaters, worried that we were too cold but didn’t know it, being so high. I couldn’t tell if this was annoying or sweet. We trudged up sloping Haight Street to her house. Willa turned the heat on right away and went to work toasting us slabs of raisin bread and globbing them with butter. The plump raisins bursting under my teeth were slimy and good. I ate walnuts out of a bag until my mouth stung, sitting on the worn couch in a living room that looked and smelled like that of a very old woman. We sat in the dark. Everyone had plates of warm bread and nuts. Willa moved in and out of the solemn darkness, serving us. I wanted to sleep, not to walk all the way back to the Mission with Laurel and Iris. I wanted to sleep there, in Willa’s bed. I did. Laurel and Iris slept on the little living room couch. They were really uncomfortable. When I woke up in the morning in my girlfriend’s bed I felt normal, and the girls had gone home, emptying the living room.
6
I may not have any right to talk to you about Suzanne. We were never that close. She was somebody else’s friend, big and smiley, and she always told me she liked my poems. In George’s bedroom she smeared purple dye on my head with a toothbrush, moving it cautiously over the bristly hairs at the nape of my neck. That night I was reading at an art gallery and she picked through a stack of my bratty rants, selecting which pieces I should perform. She read me a piece of her own, lying on a futon, with Ani DiFranco whining out from the stereo. Her poems were strong, fired with the yearning achy goodness that made her seem young. She’d told us about doing so much heroin back in Seattle, but it all seemed far away from this shiny girl who stuck a nail through her ear and wrote about it while waiting for her food stamps at 8th and Mission. One night I was at a party with her and other friends, one of those parties you hear about thirdhand and you get there and don’t know anyone and the host drunkenly accommodates you and you stake out a little corner and sheepishly drink her alcohol. Actually I think we stole the alcohol. I remember having a heavy bottle of Absolut tucked awkwardly under my jacket and thinking, well if they can afford Absolut then I’m not going to feel bad about swiping it. A Robin Hood gesture, I thought. Walking home, Suzanne kept loudly trying to get me to recite one of my poems, and I was embarrassed. Come on, please, she said. We all went back to my house.
That night a prostitute got beaten up in the parking lot across the street from my house. A different night I would’ve slept through it, it happened at about three in the morning, but we were all there, awake, mixing the stolen Absolut with tap water and ice, sipping it from my roommate Denise’s coffee cups. Lulu was there, and Vinnie. George and Brad had gone up to Dolores Park to make out behind the fat leafy palm trees. And Suzanne, we found her later, out front on the sidewalk, sprawled drunk and spinning in her head. We weren’t the only ones who heard the woman screaming, a guy a few doors down rushed into the street with a two-by-four held thickly in his hands. He looked bewildered and completely unprepared to use it. I had tried to find a weapon too, but looking around my room saw nothing dangerous and took only my body out into the lot where a pickup truck stuffed with men peeled out onto 17th Street and a broken-looking whore dripped tears and blood onto the sidewalk. They had raped her, of course. Stabbed her too, in the hand, it looked like, and not too bad, but it was hard to tell because she was fucked up and freaked out, one minute doubled over and howling like a shot animal, then sprinting away like she was scared we’d hurt her too. We told her we’d help her, told her we’d take her to the hospital, and when she said she wanted to just go home we told her we’d take her there. She slung her thin arms around my and Lulu’s shoulders and we walked her toward Mission, pausing when she stopped to double over again and scream. Vinnie walked to the side, uncomfortable and scared, and the blood from the woman’s hand dripped onto my shirt. At Mission Street a cop car pulled up and the woman spun her head to them, her crazy red face streaked with tears and makeup, yelling Where were you when I needed you! Where were you when they. . . . you don’t give a fuck about whores! She was planted on the sidewalk in her worn-down heels and I was trying to steer her away from the slowing cruiser. Come On, It’s Ok, We’ll Get You Home. The cops drove up onto the sidewalk, flew out of the car, left the door open so you could see the lights blinking on the dash, hear the sputtery static voices from the radio. What’s the problem here. Does she need medical attention? What’s going on? You don’t give a fuck about me, fuck you! Come On, I whispered, and to the cops, She’s Fine, She’s Not Hurt Bad, We’re Going To Take Her Home. She may need medical—GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME! We’ll Take Her To The Hospital If She Needs To Go, Really. Come on, I think you should come with us. GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME! Hey, She Doesn’t Want To Go With You. Her arm was wrapped around my shoulders, her fingers clutching. She Was Just Attacked, Leave Her Alone. Let go of her, said the cop. There were two of them, both men, mustaches, the blue shirts, the hats, the waists hung with guns and cuffs and other coply accessories. They told me I was interfering with an officer. Don’t You Get It? I was crying. She Was Raped, She Doesn’t Want To—The cop just grabbed her, pulled her arm off my shoulders, and the other moved behind me and scooped my arms up behind my back and held them there, painful and immobile. Now you just calm down, he said to me, while the other shoved her screaming into the cop car. Let Me Go! I was screaming too, Let Me Go, I’ve Done Nothing! It’s ok, Michelle,
it’s ok, Lulu said gently, crying, telling the cop to let me go. You Are Going To Hell! I screamed at the cop holding me. It was all I could think to say, watching the other pig stuff the bleeding woman into the car. You Are Going To Hell! I screamed again and again like a crazy woman. Another cop car pulled up to the curb and yet another cop climbed out, a woman, sent to calm me down. Now just calm down, she said, calm down. You Tell Him To Let Me Go, I said to her, my jaw tight. Now you just calm down, she repeated, and he’ll let you go. Fuck You, I said. Thank you! yelled the prostitute from the window as the cop car pulled out into the street.
But really I wanted to tell you about Suzanne, who was passed out on the sidewalk as the cop bound my arms to my back and I screamed. Suzanne, who shared a house with George and with crazy mean Chip who brought tricks home to pay his cheap Mission rent even though everyone knew he had a trust fund. Until everything broke and George moved out, all three of them lived in this house that crawled with cats and drama. George then asked if I would go with him to get his things. Laurel and Iris helped too. It felt like a bad high school hallway, loading out crates of books and blankets while Chip and Suzanne whispered and cackled and hurled things against the wall, making us jump. George decided to leave most of his shit on the curb out front for whoever wanted it. I grabbed some thermals and a blanket. He pulled from his pocket a fat magic marker and wrote Chip Is A Rapist on the sidewalk. George was really into appropriating the word “rapist” and applying it to different circumstances. It was a good word to fling at someone when your feelings were hurt. Suzanne ran down the stairs and shouted all kinds of mean things, not just at George but at Iris and Laurel and me. I guess we became enemies then. It was pretty dumb since we were never super-friendly in the first place. She was this unstable girl who hated me now so ok, whatever. At a Tribe 8 show the next week she tried to get this fucked-up gang of girls to beat up Iris. She was crazy. And then after moving out, George started talking to her again. I Wouldn’t Ever Talk To Her Again, I snapped at him. After How She Treated You? She’s A Bitch. George shrugged. I hate when you hate someone in solidarity with a friend, and then they make up and you’re left feeling weirdly betrayed and unsure how to act. She’s whoring, George told me. We were driving around in the silvery-blue station wagon that was his temporary home. He would pull it up to the dunes at Ocean Beach and somehow curl his tall body up in the back and sleep. She’s working on Capp Street. On The Street? I asked. Jesus, Why Is She Doing That? She Should Work For An Agency, Girls On The Street Aren’t Safe. Some freak pulls up and opens the door and that’s it. She says the women all look out for each other. Still. She Could Get Killed. But she didn’t. At a crowded party, I was leaving the bathroom and I walked right into her. Can I talk to you? she asked. Sure, I said, apprehensively. The bathroom was dim, lit by a single blue light, and she said, I’ve been whoring. I Know, I said uncertainly. She was crying. Can I hug you? She knew that I had worked before too. I just needed to touch another whore. Listen, You Should Work For An Agency If You’re Going To Work. If Some Psycho Wants To Kill A Woman, He’s Going To Pick One Up Off The Streets. I told her about the woman we tried to help months ago, the bleeding lady the cops took away while Suzanne herself lay drunk in the street, feet away. She nodded. She had had a weird trick, she told me, this weird guy. She spent the day with him. Yeah, It’s Weird, I said. It’s A Weird Fucking Job. The guy was a regular. Regulars Are Weird, I told her. If You See Someone On A Regular Basis It Turns Into A Relationship. I was hugging her, talking to her, and she calmed down, wiped at her eyes with her wrists. Then she was hostile again. Backed away, her face all stone. I don’t know, she snapped, I still have issues with you. She left the bathroom, shut the door behind her. Fuck you, Suzanne. She needed a whore to hug her while she freaked out and then, fuck off, I’m her enemy again. I barely knew her. She was crazy.
So she was doing heroin again, and whoring on Capp Street. Her roommates kicked her out. They couldn’t deal with her friends and her shooting up in her bedroom. At the house meeting she said it was like they were racist, making her leave because she was a junkie. I don’t know where she went when she left. And then she died. She was trying to kick and the people at the hospital sent her away, full of malnutrition and hepatitis. She was so sick that she died. She did not OD. The workers at General don’t care about junkies, everybody knows that. Her poems were good, I thought. She was young and she’d get older and be different. I had a dream after she died that she brought me to the point of death and then shot me up with electricity, pure sex and oatmeal. Oh, she ate oatmeal every day, her friends told me. She thought it cured depression. I didn’t know that. I barely knew her at all. She was on hold, someone I’d be friends with when she got her shit together. And then she died.
7
On Valencia Street I discovered coffee. Life became expansive, it grew outward. My insides bubbled over onto the Mission streets I walked, high on my new beverage. I hadn’t known it was a drug, that you didn’t drink it so much as you did it. I had always thought it another bitter beverage that adults drank, like alcohol, only I understood the purpose of liquor, while coffee was a hot, dark mystery, a nasty stew. I don’t know why I started drinking it except that there were so many coffeehouses in San Francisco and it seemed right to sip the stuff while sitting there, hunched over my papers like all the scruffy students and poets, each at our own round tables with warm cups and purpose. Then bing wham zip, my blood became charged, became something else, and I was smarter, my brain some kind of cornucopia of thought. And I was happier. Not that I had been depressed, but you can always take a good mood a little further. I felt joyful, and excited, very excited, as if the sidewalk outside the cafe were about to erupt into some magnificent carnival and I was on the edge of my seat, brimming with thought, sinking it into my notebook quick before life bumped up against me like a big animal and took me in its jaw. It is a fact that people who drink coffee are less likely to commit suicide. A study somehow came to this conclusion. But Willa was trying to get me to quit my new friend Coffee. She said it made my eyes get all buggy like I was on drugs for real. I am hyper enough already that people have mistaken me for a speed freak and avoided making my acquaintance. Willa was one of those people. I tried not drinking any coffee because she promised that once you got past the first three days off coffee you could wake up in the morning and drink a glass of orange juice and have all this energy and inspiration and it was great. I’d been drinking orange juice off and on my whole life, without coffee, and had never experienced any druglike sensations from it, but since Willa actually started to avoid me during the earlier part of the day, when the effects of the caffeine were strongest, I figured why not give it a try.
I was in the Castro on like the second day without coffee, a beautiful sunny day with millions of gay people shopping and I was walking down Market with Willa and Ashley and I just started sobbing. Everything slowed down like I was sick, talking was hard and not fun, and I hated having to lift my legs to move forward. It was miserable, life was suddenly terrible and I felt like a chump, like I had been viewing reality through some inauthentic window that made everything look nice when really it wasn’t. The worst thing about depression is how true your vision seems, like misery is the only correct perspective and everything you think when you’re happy is a sham. I didn’t even want to be happy anymore because I’d rather live in honest misery than fake bliss. I cried openly through the throngs of cheerful lesbians and boys with neat haircuts and why does everyone in the Castro look so fucking healthy? Maybe you should drink some coffee, Ashley suggested. All this pain just to be more sensitive to the subtle uplift of orange juice didn’t seem worth it. I remember Willa was especially unsympathetic. I had a dramatic arm slung around each of their shoulders like the grand martyr, and Willa was obliviously window shopping in the awful stores. Actually she was deeply in love with Ashley and undoubtedly consumed by her own tragedy, but I’ll write that book another time. I drank some coffee and my outlook impr
oved immensely. I was ready to write some poems and, I don’t know, get drunk, run around, take my shirt off and get kicked out of someplace. You know, live a little. But I wondered about being with someone who tried to stop me from drinking coffee. Once the caffeine hit, the analytical part of my brain went haywire trying to figure out the nature of my so-called relationship with Willa. I’d grill her again and again, arranging everything nicely, intellectualizing it all. But it was getting a little thin. Even I was bored with trying to convince her that she was in love with me, or that she should be. When I ended our relationship again a month later it was a lot nicer, no swearing or headbanging, civilized. Two caffeinated air signs, me the wired Aquarius, and Libra Willa delicately perky on a little pot of tea. I was haunted by the thought that maybe Iris had been my True Love. What a concept. A Where’s Waldo? of the heart. I don’t buy it anymore, true love. But I decided she was. It had been so passionate, so intense. I had to get Iris back. Would she even have me, after I had put her in the hospital and coldly dumped her in front of the sad displaced buffalo? Lately Iris’s house had been the fun place to hang out. The house was unusual for San Francisco in being new, small, with carpet in the bedrooms and linoleum in the kitchen. A regular house, not a Victorian. It had an ugly modern lamp on the ceiling, very bright. This night it was me, Laurel, George, Iris and her roommate Candice, who was still kind of bitchy, but I pretended like we were best pals. It broke her down a little. The other roommate, Lucille, was always depressed and would shut herself in her room and stomp about loudly whenever she heard people having fun. Laurel was mysterious in seeming to give so much of herself away in conversation, yet keeping whole important chunks of herself under wraps. You engaged eagerly in her conversation hoping it would be the moment she gave it all away, and she never did, but you never felt ripped off. Laurel made you believe in the subconscious mind. George was an event. He was tall and obnoxious in that newly queer, newly punk way, over-compensating for his recent history of academic hippiedom in Iowa where he’d joined a fraternity and had to memorize the text from the Budweiser label. The best was when he pierced his tongue and made a big show about soaking it in salt water, stretching his six-foot-something frame across Iris’s linoleum, his protruding tongue dangling into a cup of the stuff. He could’ve simply rinsed. Every conversation was a vehicle for George to demonstrate his stellar political consciousness, which was fine because everyone’s political consciousness was very fresh and important and we loved to dress them up and trot them around the ring. Sometimes Candice’s recent ex-girlfriend, Lulu, was there. That was a little embarrassing for me since she was one of the first people I met in San Francisco, when I was just slowly coming out of the coma induced by my banquet of ’70s-flavored feminism, and I would argue with her in bars about S/M and pornography. I like being objectified, she said daringly in the dark over beer, and she really had me. I mean what do you say to that? “Me Too” would’ve been nice, but I just wasn’t there yet.