by Michelle Tea
The three of us were up against the bar. Josiah’s eyes roamed and me and Iris ordered Long Island Iced Teas, such a high school drink but we had very little money between us and wanted to get the most booze for our buck. The drink always makes the bartender look put-out and want to see your ID. The only other women in that bar were two fag hags and a couple of drag queens. Josiah was pouting because Iris was the one getting all the looks. For real. She looked like the most beautiful teenage boy, baseball hat a little crooked, t-shirt baggy so you couldn’t see her tits. I moved away from her. We wanted to encourage the attention. We wanted a guy to pick her up and then buy her a drink because we were so out of money. Those Long Island Iced Teas were like five bucks each. And were watery. We were hunting for a nice middle-class NAMBLA guy, one of the older potbellied ones. It was delicious not to touch Iris. The more I watched, the more she became a boy. Amazing. I studied her expression. She cruised the guy to her left shyly, she’s young. She moved her eyes like Josiah, silently hungry, and I became her fag hag, standing a little to the side, looking bored, watching the boys admire her. An older guy with a moustache came over, real jovial, trying to get a cigarette. I was friendly but he ignored me completely, focused on Iris. That night was the noisiest, all blaring disco and would you believe I knew most of the words. I leaned against the bar and sang, waiting for Iris to hustle a drink off the daddy. Josiah was gone, off walking through the chain-link, his long black braids swinging down his back. He was telling people his name was Nicholas, and it occurred to me that Josiah probably wasn’t his real name either. I wished I looked like a boy. There wasn’t anything for me to do. The sugar daddy up and left before Iris could get that drink off him. Our iced teas were gone, and then Iris had to pee. I followed her to the bathroom, pushing through so many men. She really was a boy in that place. What was I? I was in love. We reached the restrooms and the girls’ room was locked, of course, the key back at the bar. We went into the men’s room, one long urinal lining the wall like a slop trough for pigs. Iris dropped her pants and squatted over the little drain on the floor, peed right into it.
We grabbed Josiah and moved across the street to San Francisco’s self-proclaimed “only lesbian bar.” Mostly men. It was unbelievably crowded and so many smells, hair spray, perfume. What about environmental illness, the lesbian disease? We moved toward the outdoor patio, Iris stealing drinks along the way. The music was awful. What were they playing? Madonna. “Holiday.” Iris was yelling. Oh yeah, if we just took a holiday, it would be all right! All the homeless people just need a little holiday! All across the world. In every nation. This one’s for you, Rwanda! Go Cuba, Go Cuba! If I took my shirt off I’d be kicked out of the city’s only lesbian bar. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. My nipples were twitching. I was coveting an abandoned Corona, half-full with a little lime bobbing at the top. I was planning my move when two men sat down between me and the bottle. Hey, Can You Hand Me That Corona? They weren’t fooled. They did it, though. They liked us because we were making fun of everyone. The two men were our new friends. We loved them. Their faces were bright red from drinking and they kept telling us to fuck off, I don’t know why. It was really funny. They hated men. Oh, We Hate Men Too, we said, and bonded on that for a little. Then the barbacks came to herd us out, prodding us toward the door, snapping and yelling, totally useless because it was so packed you couldn’t move. We swiped more drinks and knocked them back. One had Kahlua in it, now that’s a mom drink. The bartender was demanding that Iris put down her drink and leave. You’ve got two minutes before I rip it out of your hand, she growled. The meanest bitches worked there. I Hate This Place, Why Did We Come Here? We walked home, Iris drinking the beer I smuggled out beneath my coat. She smashed the glass on the sidewalk and laughed. She spit on parked cars and kicked them. Iris was a bicycler. One of those Critical Massers. About a month earlier she’d been doored and had to go to acupuncture, so she was righteous in the harm she did to automobiles. Plus she was against capitalism and all that. She started climbing on them, these nice shiny cars. She tried to hop off the roof of one and fell on her ass, legs up in the air and her head by the bumper. My Uncle Charlie broke his leg that way when he was a kid, but Iris was all right. She was just a troublemaker, that’s all.
9
September in northern Georgia, way out by Tennessee, and I was trapped in Iris’s childhood home with absolutely nothing to do. Iris’s schoolteacher sister was getting married. I was there to pretend to be straight to a wide family of strangers, and to watch my butch girlfriend walk through a church in a hideous dress and a faceful of makeup. The dress was raw silk, deep maroon, with little rosettes on the sleeves like a morbid birthday cake. Dyed-to-match pumps and pearl-drop earrings. Somehow I had thought this would be fun, back when we were aiming the fat blue station wagon George lent us, in exchange for a month sleeping in a real bedroom, Iris’s, through the country, stopping in Mexico, Tucson, Austin. Hot places. Sleeping in the back of the car and waking so dehydrated our tongues were like socks stuck thickly to the roofs of our mouths. Two dykes at a big Southern Baptist wedding. To Iris it was like playing a little trick on her extended family, sneaking her lezzie girlfriend in under their noses. For me it was an anthropological study and also kind of zany. Sure. Iris’s sister took one look at my hacked green hair and burst into tears. You’ve really gone too far this time, she hissed at Iris, beginning a passive-aggressive hair war with everyone but me. The bride was screaming and crying all week long. To my face she was real charming and pleasant. She would say hello and ask me empty questions, then take Iris’s poor mother by the hand, lead her into another room and get hysterical. I just lay on the couch and tried to stay out of it. I hadn’t been inside a family for years, and I’d forgotten how inherently dysfunctional it was. I watched TV. Iris sat beside me. We were both so bored, what else could we do? We watched MTV, catching up on videos we had missed in San Francisco where no one had cable. We watched Beavis & Butthead and agreed that it was funny. We felt deranged. It was making us sick, Georgia, physically sick. Something about Iris’s mom’s house. The new carpet in the living room had chemicals that made us fuzzy and lethargic, or maybe it was all the Folgers coffee. We just could not get our asses off the couch. Daisy, the excitable cocker spaniel who later would meet with unspeakable tragedy, would bounce over with her spitty braid of rope and Iris would raise a weak arm and toss it into the kitchen. Daisy would slide across the linoleum like a kids’ toy come to life and bring the braid back, beaming. I thought Daisy was cute, but she smelled bad, like a dog, and she was using up too much of my girlfriend’s precious energy. I ignored Daisy and watched TV, this documentary about a girl who was like a feral child, locked in a closet for years by cruel parents and eventually discovered by greedy psychologists wanting to be the next what’s-her-name, the woman who taught Helen Keller to sign. Anne Sullivan. The doctors dumped the girl once they realized she wasn’t catching on and might be retarded from birth, which may be why her parents shut her in the closet in the first place. It was sad. She was a thin, haunted girl who had sunk so far into her brain, all those years in the dark, how could she ever come back? She grinned huge when the doctors played catch with her. There was also this great made-for-TV movie with the blonde girl from 90210 playing this wild child who gets locked up in a terrible institution. I loved stories about incarcerated girls, but I was still bored out of my skull, and the mysterious chronic fatigue had us both on perma-lounge. Me and Iris had thought it would be fun to have sex there, in the house where she grew up, Mom sleeping lightly at the end of the hall, and we did attempt some weak teenage boy–teenage girl seduction in front of the television, but really we were exhausted. And the lighter fluid for Iris’s mudflap-girl zippo had leaked in the suitcase and contaminated the latex gloves, and the replacement ones we bought at the drugstore weren’t regular clingy latex, they were these enormous, boxy plastic things that felt dorky to fuck in. And we couldn’t smack each other or play around with the recycled
bicycle tire whip because it could wake Mom. We tried it once and traumatized poor Daisy. Even the sound of Iris’s hand landing on my ass had her whimpering and scurrying across the linoleum, cowering in the sewing room. Depressed that our sexual violence disturbed the dog, we resumed our sluglike positions in front of the television.
We were trying to stay removed from the pre-wedding drama erupting around us, and we did, except Iris indulged in a terrific fight with her mom about how no one was ever going to spend six thousand dollars on a wedding for her now, were they? A true complaint, but Iris was being so bratty and mean that her mom started crying and it was terrible. Iris was furious at all the gifts her sister was getting. They were arranged in the spare room like a set from the home shopping network, all spread out on rose-colored tablecloths. She got everything, even doubles and triples of some items, like multiple toaster ovens and iced tea makers and espresso machines. She doesn’t even drink espresso! Iris yelled. I drink espresso! Her whole thing seemed pretty babyish. Iris was, by my standards, adequately spoiled, despite the avenues of heterosexual privilege that had been shut off to her. The fight went on, with Iris raging and her mom sputtering, and then we jumped in the car and drove into Tennessee to go to the movies. Half of me felt I should’ve stayed in the poisonous house hugging the mom. She was a sweet lady with that bad-mom complex about trying to please everyone in the family, creating a house full of spoiled whiny children. She had her hands full with the prima donna bride, and I think she was counting on Iris’s simple lesbian nature for support. She had bought us bags of tortilla chips to eat on our visit. She was really excited about them. I guess they weren’t her usual snack.
So we escaped to the movies, the new A Nightmare on Elm Street. We nearly got kicked out of the ladies’ room afterward, for being boys. I had all that pent-up energy from sitting so long in the dark, my ass numb and tingly, and I was trying to shake it out by jumping all over Iris, horsing around in the big empty bathroom. An old lady with hair like a chlorinated pool came in and burst out, all terror-stricken, You’re in the wrong room! I paused mid-leap and said to her, What? What Did You Say? Not to be challenging but because I really hadn’t heard her. I guess I seemed threatening, so amped up and hopping in her face. She stood there horrified until Iris said, She thinks we’re boys, and I started laughing, and said, We’re Girls and the old woman looked even more frightened and said, Oh my, oh I am so sorry, and darted into a stall.
Me and Iris were trying hard to come up with activities that kept us off the couch, preferably out of the house, away from the sad codependent mom and the wicked-witch sister. We drove one night to Chattanooga to see Donna, Iris’s childhood friend who, miraculously, was also a dyke. Donna was sweet with frizzy brown hair, a round face and that thick syrupy accent I hoped Iris would take back to San Francisco. Donna worked in Chattanooga’s only sex shop, really more of a novelty shop, with wind-up penises that hop and naked lady toothbrushes. I was picking up different items and threatening to buy them for the sister’s wedding present. Love-cuffs. Edible body oils that tasted like melted popsicles. A French maid outfit. Donna was wild. She told excellent stories in that southern voice, her daddy and his gun sitting on top of their roof, waiting to shoot some boys who were bothering her at school. Now, I had always thought drugs were the property of urban living, but apparently they’re a big problem everywhere, especially in quiet southern towns where everyone’s bored. Donna had had a big drug problem, but supposedly she’d calmed down and was aiming to move to San Francisco in the winter. She took us to Alan Gold’s, the big gay spot in Chattanooga, and we saw the best drag queen ever with rhinestones pasted to her cheeks like tears, and a fat sparkling tiara. She was mouthing the words to “Miss World.” Alan Gold’s was packed, everyone was dancing and carrying on. Donna bought us pitchers of beer and asked if we wanted some coke if she could find it. Iris did. She was very into drugs right then. During our overnight stopover in Athens, on the way to the wedding, she’d smoked opium, sucking the melty black liquid through a straw off the edge of a Waffle House ashtray. I declined. We were at this filthy, smoke-thick apartment inhabited by the straight boys Iris used to play music with in college. All these guys were there and I just wanted to sleep. For a while I tattooed the glyph for Uranus, my ruling planet, onto the inside of my ankle, dipping the burnt tip of a sewing needle into a puddle of ink and poke poke poke while Iris “jammed” with her old band, whacking the shit out of a crumbling little drum kit with split heads and a foot pedal that kept slipping off the rim. Eventually I conked out on the scroungy pull-out couch while Iris stayed up watching The Jeffrey Dahmer Story on video and smoking. She was pretty alert for someone who had just done opium.
So back to Donna darting around the club trying to score drugs. Me and Iris went into the girls’ room and I ate her pussy in one of the stalls. We were still in that phase of the relationship, barely. Back at the bar Donna was drugless, going on about the Butchest Woman in Chattanooga who thought she was so tough and cool and kept stealing everyone’s girlfriend. I was dying to see her. Show Me, Show Me! She’s the one in the red vest over at the bar, Donna said, flicking a dismissive hand in the woman’s direction. Donna was bitter. I guess she got a girl swiped, one with long red hair that curled thick like a princess. The Butchest Woman in Chattanooga had come and swept her away. I had to see. I sashayed over to the bar and spotted a red leather vest like the one Billy Idol wore in the poster I had above my bed in eighth grade. Here it rested on this woman with the biggest blonde hair, bleached and teased to brittleness. Heavy eye shadow and gobs of lipstick. Amazing. This was the Butchest Woman in Chattanooga, the set of her jaw affirmed it, the way she stood and the way she held her cigarette. I watched her slug her beer at the bar and then went back to Iris.
Alan Gold’s closed and Donna, having failed on the cocaine quest, was determined to at least have pot. We drove in her car to the home of some paranoid lesbians who were up watching a talk show. They didn’t seem to like me and Iris. Their suspicious scowls kept us hovering by the door, squinting at the television. They gave Donna a bulging bag of green and we left. It was free! she squealed happily, climbing into the car. They owe me. Back at Donna’s house Iris rolled joints and I was at the television, trying to find the talk show the drug dealers had on. Pot makes me feel like I forgot to drink my coffee. I did not want any of the smoldering cigarette, and I did not want a sniff from the tiny brown glass bottle Donna had brought out of her bureau drawer. Poppers. They sold them at the porn store where she worked. Iris and Donna were holding the bottle under their noses and falling back against the wall. Like in grade school when we all made ourselves pass out by hyperventilating and squeezing the sides of our throats. It was head cleaner for video-tapes, making them giggle all slumped against the wall. Something like that. I felt old and cranky. I wanted to sleep. For some reason I was actually caring that poppers killed brain cells. I don’t know what was wrong with me. Donna had an original Howard Finster and that was kind of impressive, a wooden animal like a giraffe, all covered with his rambling scrawl, stuff about god and visions. But I hated Donna’s house. The kitchen was under construction, with a plaster-filled sink plopped in the middle, and the bedroom had this depressing yellowy lightbulb. Donna was fanatically trying to get Iris to smoke more and more pot. I’m really stoned, Iris said weakly, her big blue Pisces eyes full of smoke and water. I never see you! Donna protested. Come on, finish the bag with me. It was kind of twisted, the obsessive hospitality of a southern drug addict. Donna gave us her bed and went off to sleep somewhere in the kitchen debris. Me and Iris climbed under the blankets and she started up this little role play that disgusted me, pretending we were two slobs in a filthy apartment watching crappy TV. I’m Really Not Into It, I said, and went to sleep before I got any grouchier.
The next day we hopped into Iris’s mom’s car, nicer than George’s unregistered station wagon, and drove to this Fort Oglethorp tattoo shack, the one with the air-brushed sign advertising Chero
kee, Lady Tattooist. Inside was Cherokee, nodding out on a busted naugahyde seat, a mile-long ash burning in her hand. We came back the next day, and she was looking more alive, so I had her put a flaming heart on my arm, the word “lezzie” stretched across a banner in shaky script. Cherokee didn’t even flinch at my request. She and her chatterbox husband told us stories about these legendary lesbians who dropped by occasionally to “get some work done.” One in particular was real rough and tended to get into fistfights with men. I was dying for her to walk in, but it was just me and Iris in Cherokee’s cramped little tattooing space. She burned incense and played a tape of Celtic chanting music as she sank the colors into my arm, saying, Don’t try to be a hero. This gets too much for you, just let me know an’ we’ll take a break. A nice switch from sadistic Picasso of Tucson, Arizona. Talking about how big burly men bust out crying at the sound of the tattoo gun, but women, they’re stronger. Lezzie? she asked. L-E-Z-Z-I-E? I nodded. There I was in the middle of nowhere, having to play straight for an aging Baptist family I didn’t even know, tattooing “lezzie” on my shoulder. Crying out for help, obviously. I thought about the peaceful Virgin Mary while Cherokee ran the burning gun over my arm. She bandaged me up, and I gave fifty dollars to her and fifty dollars to Billy Joe in the other room, who had tattooed Siamese fighting fish on Iris’s shoulder. Back into Mom’s car and home with our newly ornamented bodies.