Valencia

by Michelle Tea

  10

  That was the year I puked on every winter holiday. If I was lucky, I had my head jammed down a toilet, innards convulsing. If I was unlucky, the stuff went elsewhere. Thanksgiving I was at Iggy’s house back when I first met her, when she was fresh to the city from Chicago. Iggy was a loud redhead who told stories so incredible you wondered if they were true but ultimately didn’t care because you were so enraptured by her grand gestures and re-enactments. And they were true. Iggy drank, and she cooked tremendous gourmet meals, and she smoked tons of cigarettes. I was glad that her place was a smoking household since me and Iris were a big smoking couple. Every morning Iris would rig up the espresso machine in her kitchen and froth us up these great soy milk coffee drinks, and about halfway through the glass, weighty pint glasses stolen from The Stud or The Uptown, we’d grab our smooshed blue packs of American Spirits and light up. I loved sitting on her back porch, on the peeling grey stairs that looked on to the weedy empty lot where homeless people slept on damp mattresses. A fat, magnificent palm tree grew in the middle, its top a burst of heavy leaves like an ancient jungle. I would sit and look at the tree and smoke and think about how great my life was. I leaned back against the rickety wooden crates packed with dirt and sunflowers, tangled vines with little yellow tomatoes you could pop in your mouth. Iris’s garden. She would come and sit beside me on the old wood, and the stereo from her room would leak out, Sonic Youth or PJ Harvey. PJ Harvey was ours. So tortured about what? Why were we tortured? We were in love and life was a fast current swarming around our ankles, threatening to topple us into the wet part of the planet. It was intense, that’s why we were tortured. It was enormous and exploding like that palm tree. Iris was my Yuri-G, my Delilah, my Stella Marie. Strong dark women you had to love with a strong dark heart that throbbed in gorgeous pain because love is terrible. I mean, ultimately. It would go away like a needle lifting from the vinyl at the end of the song, we knew this. The music would cease, one of us would die or else we’d just break up, and this drove us to drink from each other like two twelve-year-olds sneaking vodka from the liquor cabinet, trying to get it all down, trying to get as fucked up as possible before we got caught.

  But back to Thanksgiving. Iggy cooked this huge fucking turkey, draped in warm apples and all that luscious grease, and you know I don’t eat meat, or I didn’t, hadn’t for years and I stared longingly at the bird as it was brought from the oven for basting. Iggy bravely endured the lesbian/turkey baster jokes from the boys, and I sucked in the stink of roasting flesh like a cigarette. The turkey was in everything. It didn’t even occur to Iggy that some people might not eat meat. Every dish had a bit of the bird in it. The stuffing had been up its butt, the gravy had been cooked from its muscle like sweat. All me and Iris could do was eat plain mashed potatoes, drink wine and smoke. I’m having some stuffing, Iris said defiantly, and that was great because if she could, I could too. I don’t mind doing awful things as long as somebody else does. I would totally jump off the bridge, thanks for asking. I scooped a lump of the nasty stuffing onto my plate. And what was the difference between the stuffing and the gravy, both were tainted with the deceased turkey’s secretions. I glopped a gorgeous, golden puddle of gravy onto my mashed potatoes. It was a holiday. I brought the plate into the living room with my wine and sat down in front of Real World on MTV. I had never seen it before, and as you might guess I got very wrapped up in it. Iggy’s mom was visiting from Chicago, a short and charismatic woman in a sweatshirt that said I My Attitude Problem. Everyone ate the food and I kept thinking about that tray of turkey sliced up all nice on top of the stove. Turkey had been my favorite animal to eat. The tinge of it in my gravy was making me crazy, it was so good. What would happen if I ate some. Would I lose all respect for myself? Did anyone still care about animal rights? My shoes were leather, the people were right, I was a hypocrite. I Left My Cigarettes In The Kitchen, I said and hopped up, the fatty gravy sloshing around with the wine in my belly as I approached the oven and like a bulimic adolescent stuffed slabs of meat into my mouth. It didn’t taste as good as I thought it would. I was not prepared for the reality of its thick, fleshy texture, the juices that oozed into my mouth as I chewed. I was too used to eating fake meat products that, once you adjusted, gave all the benefits of real meat without the gagging fat and gristle. I choked the turkey down and went back into the living room with a fresh glass of wine. I Ate Turkey, I confessed immediately. I knew that’s what you were doing! Iggy hooted, delighted in that way carnivores get when vegetarians slip, like they knew we couldn’t live without meat and would eventually give in to our flesh-shredding instinct. Iris looked disappointed in me as she chewed the spiced bread that had been marinating up the bird’s ass. Oh well.

  When the food was digested as much as food like that can, we all piled, drunk, into the car that Iggy’s out-of-town roommate was letting her borrow. Iggy turned the radio up loud, PJ Harvey, and we all talked about how dumb it was to be driving drunk through the city in a borrowed car on Thanksgiving. We made it to The Stud and I, for one, got more beer. I don’t have a driver’s license. The bartender who worked the far end, by the DJ booth, liked to give beers away to the dykes. He was this cute, bald boy who would do snaky, gyrating dances behind the bar while he poured your beer. So I had my free beer and then Iggy grabbed me as I swung by her stool and she dragged me over to the counter and said, Have you ever had Goldschlager? Had What? Two, she ordered from the bartender, who immediately dropped a couple shot glasses onto the bar and started filling them up with a thick liquid that had some shit floating in it. Goldschlager! Iggy hollered. It’s got fucking gold in it! twenty-four-karat flakes. For real, suspended and glinting in the syrupy drink. I would have loved Goldschlager in high school, it would have gone so well with the glittery twinkling teenage alcoholic faerie thing I was doing. One hundred fifty proof and so glamorous with that expensive confetti in it. Is It Ok To Drink Gold? I’m sure it is, Iggy reasoned, or else they wouldn’t sell it. I knocked the shot back. It was pretty horrible, had been much better to look at, shimmering in its cup on the bar like a little lounge singer in a fancy dress. Thanks, I said to Iggy, and stumbled off to my beer and my girl.

  A few hours later I was laid out on my futon, the world somehow set loose and spinning in my forehead. Ooooooh. I opened my eyes and the dismaying sense of movement continued. My head swam on my pillow. Iris, I moaned. I felt that tingle beneath my ears, a kind of crawling at my throat. I wasn’t even that nauseated, but I knew what I was in for. Iris, I’m Going To Puke, I said, and Iris made some alarmed noise as I struggled to my knees and threw my window open hung my head over the sill and sent a great splash of vomit down three floors to the patch of scraggle and grass that was my backyard. I heard it land wetly. Blaaaa, another involuntary, unflattering sound, and more chunks careened past my landlord’s bedroom window. Oh, Iris. I wanted her to save me. She wanted to sleep. Somehow I made it to the bathroom, the narrow red water closet. I folded myself around the bowl and stuck my head in like I was bobbing for apples. My entire internal system clenched and released, clenched and released as I threw up forever. It smelted worse than anything. I guess it was all that meat, all the fat in the gravy, but it smelled like something already rotting. I opened the window to the air shaft but it barely helped. The smell alone inspired vomit. I would vomit, breathe, catch a whiff, and vomit again, a terrible cycle. Eventually I shuffled back to bed. I felt pure the way you feel after you vomit, kind of light and strangely holy, like having taken a sauna in hell. I was embarrassed that Iris had seen me at my lowest moment. I lay in bed and felt two-dimensional beneath the covers, and I fell asleep.

  I didn’t puke on Xmas, exactly. I should have. Iris invited to dinner this girl she kept denying she had a crush on, even though it was so obvious to the entire world. I should have thrown up right there at the table, as we played Truth or Dare with the tall bottle of Southern Comfort Candice had stolen from The Stud. Everyone stole candles from the place, and occasi
onally pint glasses, and now at Xmas it was fun to pull plastic snowflakes and candy canes off the wall, but the brand new bottle of Southern Comfort complete with a plastic spout was an incredible prize. She had to sneak behind the bar to get it. We drank shots of the stuff and the horrible girl in the brown dress asked me questions like, What is your relationship to “femme”? and I gave her dares like Go Into Iris’s Room And Whack Off And Be Real Loud When You Come, which Iris thought was soooo hot. Really I had wanted to dare them to make out. I could see the workings of their inevitable seduction churning in their faces, little shimmers like summer heat rising off pavement. Why was she even there? It was a family holiday, a time for feeling safe in your surroundings. She doesn’t have anywhere to go for Xmas, Iris had whined. She’s Lived Here Longer Than I Have, I shot back. Why Doesn’t She Have Any Friends, Why Doesn’t Anyone Like Her, What’s Wrong With Her?! Iris gave me a sad quiet look that said you are mean. I should’ve vomited in my Southern Comfort. I felt nauseated enough. There was my future, in the watery balls of this girl’s eyes. They bobbed in their sockets like an excitable little dog’s, like they were going to fall right out and roll across the linoleum.

  But I did not barf that night. A few nights earlier this girl Angela’s parents had gone out of town, and Angela had thrown a party. Angela was the only San Francisco girl I knew who was a native. Her parents had this big two-story house that struck me as super-wealthy, but probably it was just regular. My places are always so shoddy that anything even approaching middle-class seems extravagant. I was sure that somewhere there was a tub, a gigantic, luxurious tub we could fill up with water and bunches of girls could climb in. There would be lathers for our skin and bubbles for the water and it would be divine. We would splash and drink cocktails. This conviction grew with every tequila drink, sitting around the extra-long dinner table playing poker with beans and pennies and M&Ms. Girls were coming from all over the city to this party, with bedrolls and sleeping bags. It was a slumber party. There was an actual fountain in the yard, you could hear its quiet tinkle as you stood on the back porch smoking. If they had a fountain they had to have a tub. I began my wild quest for it, the luxurious sunken tub. At least to find an unusually large claw foot. C’mon, We’re Going To Have A Tub Party! I was grabbing random girls and tugging them up the carpeted stairs. We were going to get naked in the water and bond. Find The Tub, I was ordering these girls. They went poking their heads into rooms, looking. In some rooms people were having sex in the dark, and they would yelp when the door cracked open. One room had a shower, a normal, actually kind of shabby shower, with no bathtub. That’s Impossible! I was railing. All This Money, This Wealth, I gestured around me, And No Tub? Are They Crazy? Don’t They Know About Tubs?! Come here, yelled one of my little scouts from deep inside the parents’ bedroom. Is It A Tub? I gasped. It was a bidet. One of those fancy toilets that shoot water up your butt. No Way. Girls gathered around, watching the squirting water like it was that fountain in the yard. It was impressive. But to have a bidet and no tub? Angela’s parents were weird. Girls were discussing the masturbation potential. I think we all wanted to give it a try, but Angela busted out of a sex room and herded us out. You can’t come up here, she said, you all have to stay downstairs. It felt like high school. We marched down the stairs. Angela, Your Parents Have A Bidet! I know, she said. Downstairs everyone wanted tarot readings. Where was my girlfriend? I sat on a couch cushion on the floor and told everyone all about their future. I give fantastic tarot readings when I’m drunk. The cards fit together so smoothly and I do not mince words. Angela’s little brother wanted one, and then passed out right in the middle of it. Sitting up and everything, just sitting there, unconscious. Angela, Look At Your Brother. I read Angela’s cards instead.

  What a great party. I went up into the bathroom and puked. Very businesslike, I knew what had to be done and I did it, gave it a little jump start, finger poking down my throat and the convulsions began, dry at first and then I was retching into the bowl, there in the bright bathroom. I remember someone had left this beautiful knife on the clothes hamper, and I was thinking how someone could just steal it. I could steal it. But that would be wrong. I concluded my vomit session and rinsed my mouth. My teeth felt like stucco. By the sink lay a spiked belt, and there were latex gloves in the wastebasket, glistening with some girl. Angela had better remember to fix the bathroom before the butt-splashing parents got home. I went back to my little cushion on the floor and curled up. Are you all right? girls asked. They had heard me barfing. I lay down and my girl came and lay down with me, we curled together and slept amidst the cacophony. The party would not end. I love the party experience of everyone thinking you’re passed out when you’re not, and they talk about you and you get to passively soak up all this attention. It feels so noble somehow, like being a dying princess. Everyone talked about how cute me and Iris were, and how I had puked, poor thing. It is the closest you can come to the fantasized moment of your death, all your loved ones leaning over your casket reminiscing about you. It was nice. I felt a lot better after puking and eventually the party chilled out and I fell asleep. In the morning some industrious and not-so-hungover girl was flipping pancakes, and everyone needed big cups of water and sweet syrupy orange juice from a giant can. Sober now and squinting in the light, everyone compared notes from the night before. Two girls who I hadn’t seen at all stumbled onto the back porch. They had done acid and spent the night locked in an upstairs room. Apparently it hadn’t been pleasant, and they were still tripping. They looked pretty disturbed. Me and Iris split a cab back to the Mission with them.

  And then I puked on New Year’s. I had refused to get dressed up because that was dumb and I was deconstructing the whole concept of getting “dressed up” and why I was supposedly more attractive in this certain style of dress. It was about gender and about class and I was boycotting it. I was at Bobby’s cocktail party drinking a can of beer and everyone looked glamorous and great and I was instantly filled with regret, cursing my overly analytical mind. I was a common pauper in the same ratty things I always wore. Bobby, Can I Wear Some Of Your Clothes? Bobby looked smashing in this short, ridiculously feminine thing, sickeningly pink and flouncy and plunging all over the place. I went into his closet. He had everything, shiny plastic things I couldn’t understand how to work, tiny rubber outfits dusted with talcum powder, vinyl goddamn stockings. I selected a moderately slutty black dress with bits of netting here and there. I used a little of his eye stuff and lip stuff, I got all glammed out. And wasted so much time primping that everyone was nicely buzzed and I was sober, so I started tossing shots of booze to the back of my throat, trying to catch up. Everyone wanted to be somewhere different at midnight and it was such a big group of us I knew we would ring in the new year trying to find parking. We were on our way to a gay bar, riding in a big, crappy car, big like they don’t make cars anymore, stuffed with kids. A clown car. We parked in an alley south of Market and traipsed through rubble to our club. It was a gay club, right, but the owner had died without making any arrangements to hand it over to another homo, so it got passed on to his straight brother, who put all his asshole straight friends in key positions, like bouncer. They were at best condescending and at worst actually dangerous, physically dragging kids out or slamming them into walls. This night some friends of Iris’s had been pulled out and flung in the street for being too young. It had been brutal, becoming one of those drunk, urgent blurred dramas with all these kids clamoring around in their outfits trying to figure out who was inside and who left, where did they go, who saw it happen, should they call the cops, should they sue, girls were crying, and we needed dimes for the pay phone, and what was the proper response to it all. I’m not going in there, Iris proclaimed righteously in her slight Georgia twang. My belly floated downward on a torn parachute of hope. I knew she was right, but that’s where all our friends were, the ones who hadn’t been beaten and thrown in the gutter, and the music thumping through the walls was good s
tuff, and I was smashed, wanted to dance. Come on, Iris said. I cannot argue with righteousness. Iris was a soldier, it’s why I loved her. The faith I had in her rested like a vital organ in my body. I mean, once I got over what a sell-out she’d been at the wedding. When the revolution came Iris would lift two rifles into the air, she would throw one to me and together we would run into the streets.