Valencia

by Michelle Tea

  13

  One thing I did that February was give up on the seduction of Joey. Another was flip a coin about breaking up with Iris. The third noteworthy thing I did that month was place an ad in the gay personals. Bratty Little Bottom, it began, Looking For Tough Girls To Rough Me Up And Boss Me Around. God, I cringe just thinking about it. Don’t Want A Girlfriend, the end proclaimed, Just A Hard Sleazy Fuck. Iris didn’t have so much time for me now that her affair with Emma had blasted off. Each day another lesbian nonmonogamy boundary crumbled beneath Iris’s need. She needed to see this girl on a weekend, taboo. Make plans at the last minute, break plans with me, take her to the bar where we always went and dance with her to “Rebel Girl,” our song. As it was, Iris and Emma saw each other all day at work, kissing in the cooler of the worker-owned organic food co-op. Iris was about a day away from rent when she got that job, with practically nothing in the bank and seemingly no employment prospects. Instead of actually looking for work she was burning a green candle stamped with the word “job,” bought at the Mexican grocery on the corner. It sat glowing on her television by the bong, infusing Iris’s smoky room with luck. A couple weeks before rent was due, she had decided to pull the traveler’s check scam with the paltry $160 she had in her account at the credit union. I Don’t Know, I said. You Can Only Do This Scam Once Because They’ll Have You In Their Computer. Don’t You Want To Wait And Do It With More Money? It seemed like a lot of nerve-racking work for $320, but that was Iris’s rent exactly. So she got her money converted and went up into the Haight to go shopping. She did it all wrong. You’re supposed to spend as little money as possible cashing the checks, but Iris came home that night with a gleaming new ceramic bong from a head shop, cute knitted hats from pricey skater shops, records. Even if the scam did succeed she’d be short on rent. She tossed Confusion Is Sex on her turntable and fired up her new pot toy. Then she called the check company and told them she’d been held up at knife point in a parking lot in the Mission. I rolled my eyes. It was the worst story ever, and Iris sounded like a shady weirdo telling it. What was she doing loitering in a dark parking lot in the “bad” part of town? Why hadn’t she filed a police report? The last thing you want your scam story to be is complicated. A simple pickpocket, something the lady on the phone could imagine happening to herself. Nothing that suggests your lifestyle might be unseemly and you to blame for the theft. I once heard about a girl who didn’t get her money simply because the check place found out she stripped. She eventually got the cash, but she had to go to court to make it happen. The check people told Iris to file a police report about her “attack,” and to call the next day at exactly 3:00 p.m., something she remembered to do around 5:00 p.m. For a week, she just kept forgetting to call. It was clear that they did not believe her story. She gave up. She had some new gear and less rent money than ever. Then, on the way to her job interview at the food co-op, she bicycled past a phone booth with a wallet lying open on top. Hundreds of dollars inside. Iris checked the ID and verified that the owner was an acceptable person to steal from, a white-haired white man with a lot of credit cards. She took the dough and left the wallet, went to the interview and got the job. Iris. She was a beaming child of the cosmos, karma’s kid sister. No matter how lazy she was, how much she fucked up, how many hearts she broke in the most careless way possible, magical things kept happening to her. Money, jobs and five sweet new girls for every one she left bitter. A halo of luck around her darling dopey head. I hated her. I realized chance was on her side, and a flip of the coin would never advise me to break up with her. I would jog alongside her romance with Emma forever, waiting for it all to end.

  Nights Iris was out cavorting with Emma I went out drinking. Smoking in bars I was ok, but alone, in my room, anxiety shook me like a teakettle. I’d come home late, drunk, and check the voice mailbox for my personal ad. I was terrified that someone I actually knew might call it. Would I recognize a voice I knew? One woman left a message telling me how she would lovingly bind my wrists to her wrought-iron bed frame and tickle me with an ostrich feather. I called the number she left. Listen, I slurred, I Meant The Part In The Ad That Said “Roughed Up.” I’m Talking About Some Serious Violence Here, So Call Back If That’s What You’re Looking For. I hung up. How psychotic. I wanted to be whipped into numbness by a stranger. I wanted to be slapped around until I left my body, slid into an altered state of consciousness. The next message started out good enough, a gravely girl’s voice telling me she was going to take me into a filthy public toilet. But the fantasy disintegrated into the most ridiculous poop and pee scene ever, and I knew it was my insane friend Tatiana making fun of me. The burst of laughter at the end confirmed it. She had actually called from my house when I had run out to get cigarettes. I wanted to kill her. There were no other messages. Of course there weren’t. I knew the name and face of every S/M dyke in town, and they all knew me, and this whole personal ad thing was a big embarrassing mistake. I flipped another penny and it told me to continue my masochistic love affair with Iris. I checked my pervy voice mail again and there was a new message and it sounded all right. From a girl who had just moved here from Boston, same place I was from, so we’d have that to talk about at least. I arranged to meet her. I have a sex date with a stranger, I thought, hitching garters around my waist and throwing on a flouncy skirt. As long as I was able to keep my mind away from my heart, it seemed like a pretty cool situation. Brave and exciting. But my heart was a whirling, starving void that sucked and sucked like a terrible black hole, and when it gobbled up my logic it made what I was doing look lonely, and sleazy. I laced my Docs and grabbed my leather jacket.

  The girl’s name was Athena, and she had bleached-blonde hair covered up with a funny leather or leather-looking bandana. All black clothes, a black leather vest, kind of punky and right around my age. I couldn’t believe it. Lady warrior tattoos on her arms. All right. We talked about Boston, she was a writer and a librarian, admirable things to be. We drank beer with slices of lemon skidding on the foam. I got kind of drunk and let her take me home. When she kissed me in her dark bedroom I felt a little rasp of heat, a weak memory of my first kisses with Iris when everything inside me flared and set our rollercoaster of sex in motion. Athena had that Portishead CD on repeat, it whirred in the dark for hours. Nobody loves me, it’s true . . . She neither roughed me up nor bossed me around, though I spied whips and belts hanging from her closet door and thought maybe it was just a matter of time. She fucked me with one of those hard lucite dildos they keep in the display case at Good Vibrations, a pretty crystal of a dick. It was good until I had to fuck her back. Who was she? Should I care? Athena from Boston. I didn’t feel close to her, I didn’t know her at all. What was connecting me to her? I felt a thin panic rise. Nobody loves me, it’s true, not like you do. . . .

  I had been thinking of buying that Portishead CD but now I knew I could never listen to it. In the morning we sat and smoked on her back porch and I told Athena all about my fucked-up relationship. She nodded warily, flicked her cigarette ash into a small glass ashtray. I told her I wanted to see her again, and when I left her house and moved back out into my life I knew it wasn’t true. I walked down South Van Ness, all the crappy auto shops, fences laced with shining hubcaps. I glanced down at the sidewalk and there, carved deeply into the cement, the name Emma. I stopped. What did it mean? I bent to the ground and touched the frozen waves of cement that clumped around the letters. Emma. I walked home. I flipped another coin, and it said to break up with Iris. I Can’t Do This Anymore, I cried to her later. You’re Forcing Me To Break Up With You. Iris said nothing. She seemed stoned or retarded, a dull silence. I hung up the phone, or left the bar, or I left her house or she left mine. She let me go.

  14

  So the planet of me completed its revolution around the heart, the hot burning thing, center of my own little solar system. In those few weeks I became sort of a neighborhood fixture, like the Red Man, or that tiny woman with the thick white stuff crus
ting on her face. I was the Crying Girl, smoking on the steps of the Blue House I now lived in, phone jammed against my ear. One night was marathon, five hours I think, I called everyone but mostly Candice who had almost all her planets in Scorpio and understood the process of death and rebirth. One night I made the decision to call Iris, an enormous leap, only to learn that I had just missed her. She had left to play her drums and there was no phone at the practice space so I had to sit on the stairs and smoke cigarettes until she called me back at 10:00 p.m. What was the attitude? I had played all my angles, tossed my heart with a wet rattling thump onto her snare drum, I Love You I Love You I Love You. Such an impossible gift, impossible that it was just left there, a red pool on her drumset, beating its last weak beats. So I shifted to the other angle, the big strong Leonine one like Well Fine Who Cares Anyway Thanks For The Reality Check I’m Off To A Party Now. And I was, I jumped in the shower, washed it all off, put on pretty clothes and actually took a cab to the upper Haight to meet some friends at a party. I have terrible luck at Haight Street parties. The last one had me pulling off my yeasty underwear and dumping it on some guy’s head. He’d been discussing my ass with his friends. This party was even worse, it was right on the corner of Haight and Ashbury, a cursed and haunted neighborhood. Some skinny guy with a skinny moustache cracked open the door and told me they weren’t letting anyone in, it was too crowded. I started whining about how all my friends were inside and he gave a big sigh and swung the door open. It really was too crowded. The hallway was very traditional Haight-Ashbury, with tie-dye and trippy lights and iridescent paper covering the ceiling. Bunches of straight people, mostly men, and as I pushed my way through, a woman yelled at this relic in a floppy leather hat to please not touch her ass. It occurred to me that I would probably get in a fight with someone, filling me with a dread similar to that of having to go to work or pay the phone bill, inescapable. If I found my friends I’d be safe. I pushed through the hallway, all smoky incense and people with full cups of beer trying not to slosh it on everyone. The house was an old San Francisco Victorian, rooms branching off the long hallway. I poked my head into each one, trying to spot a familiar hairdo. The first room had a DJ spinning rap music and people were dancing or sitting on cushions smoking pot. Another room was a more intense drug scene, just a bed with people sprawled out in various stages of vegetable. Then a room with live music, a guy with his dick out playing guitar, and everyone turned and smirked at me when I entered, expectant, like they were waiting for my shocked reaction, but I was so over it. At the end of the hall you could buy a balloon of nitrous for two dollars. The final room had a microphone and a guy spoke into it. How can you tell when your sister has her period? My friends would not have spent five minutes at this party. I had blown six dollars on a cab and I was irritated. Iris didn’t love me, or loved me but didn’t want to be with me, or couldn’t be with me because her spongy Piscean nature absorbed my Aquarian electricity until all she was was me, or something like that. So she had to go and have sex with someone quiet and non-threatening. This was my interpretation. I made my way back down the obstacle course that was the hallway, slammed out of the horrid neo-hippie extravaganza and bumped into Tricky, a dyke. Don’t Go In There, I said. Really. Please, You Do Not Want To Go In There. I Have To Get Beer, Come With Me.

  Tricky was with this boy named Martian who was all done up in X-Girl drag: fuzzy skirt, baby shirt with a shiny pink heart, lots of soft girlie makeup. Martian was really annoying with his toy flashlight that he kept shining in my face. I had to buy a 22 at the grocery store since I no longer had my girl to split a 40 with. Underage Tricky slipped me a five to purchase cider for her and Martian. Out front I popped the cap off my lonely 22. Tricky was talking to a skinny wired girl, beautiful in a dark Peter Pan way. She was punk and had a cane, one of the kids who live in the park. She was waiting for someone to bring her drugs. I’m gonna get high, she said in this really out there voice that contradicted how jumpy she was, bouncing in her boots, hitting the sidewalk with her cane. Iris had been on a cane trip when I first met her. She wanted to have an affair with an older butch dyke who walked with a cane. A fantasy lover that Iris had dreamed up. Iris also wanted a cane for herself. She was sure that one day she would walk with a cane. It was one of her life predictions that she came up with in this psychic Pisces way. Something would happen to her leg or her foot. She was also certain that she would spend significant time in jail, a premonition she talked about with this strange wise toughness, as if she’d already lived through it. Tricky liked the skinny girl with the cane, and I was thinking about how Iris would like her too. We would assume these weird characters sometimes, she the runaway boygirl who lived in the park and me the tough older coke dealer who let her stay at my place, but she had to fuck me to earn her keep. This weird fantasy would occasionally leak out of the bedroom. We’d be on the bus, and she’d be talking about the kids in the park and trying to get me to buy her a skateboard.

  The punk girl eventually left to collect her drugs, and we walked back to the party. Tricky was all excited, saying, She’s a dyke, she’s a dyke, she told me she didn’t like men! Absolutely everything was annoying me. I felt like such an adult around these two, like I was babysitting. I was filled with the aged and bitter wisdom of the brokenhearted. I want to go back and find that girl, Tricky was saying. Just Come Back To The Party With Me, I said. I wanted to be sure that my friends were not in there. We pushed ourselves inside, made the awful journey up the hallway and turned around to start back for the door. We want nitrous, Tricky said. She was tugging on people. Hey who has nitrous, where can I get a balloon? No one would talk to her, and Martian kept beaming that flashlight. Listen, I’m Going Outside To Smoke A Cigarette. If You’re Not Out By The Time I’m Done, I’m Going Back To The Mission. I was feeling very bossy. My life was strongly out of my hands. I was attempting to control what I could, sitting on the corner of Haight and Ashbury with a beer and a smoke, reading an astrology book. The absorbent, subconscious nature of Pisces. And then up comes Iris on her skateboard. I heard the rumbling of wheels on concrete and looked up and she was there, flipping up her board with her feet. I Am So Glad To See You, I said in a direct, matter-of-fact way. I was completely unsurprised to see her there, sent by the universe to guide me out of this terrible, unfamiliar territory. And of course it meant something else—we had to talk more, something was unfinished. My heart was back in my body, and it was not throbbing. It was just calmly pumping blood, its purpose no longer passionate but mechanical. I felt very detached from Iris, this girl I had spent the past eight months with. Yet I needed her to know how detached, how over it, how completely above the whole situation I was. I had the idea that I was a very noble animal, committed to romance and passion, and if she was not qualified to share that with me, then, whatever. I Promise You You Don’t Want To Go In There, I said. She looked around at the loitering straight men and knew it was true. I told her I was waiting for Martian and for Tricky, who was trying to score nitrous, and then they came out, sober. We tried to formulate a plan. Martian was pointing the toy flashlight at Iris’s face, and I finally grabbed it and pushed it down, saying, You’ve Got To Stop With That Light, in the no-nonsense voice of a schoolteacher or dominatrix. Iris looked at me, surprised. This was my pain, my intense spiritual maturity that no one could match. Iris was a floundering child, too young to understand how precious I was. She wanted to play.

  Iris had come to the party in search of the friends I hadn’t been able to find. We spent a long time musing about where they could be and a longer time sliding quarters into pay phones, dialing up answering machines. Finally Vinnie answered. Of course they didn’t stay at the party, they went to some awful gay bar and drank beer. I didn’t even know that Haight Street had a gay bar. Vinnie was concerned about me, trapped in the upper Haight with Iris. It’s Ok, I said quickly, I’m Totally Over It. We walked to the corner to wait for a bus back to the Mission. I had a beer, Iris didn’t. I was draining the bott
le before the bus came. I bummed a dollar from her to pay my fare. Don’t worry about it, she said, or something like that, something reminiscent of the olden days of communal girlfriend-ship. I’ll Pay You Back, I said, along with some phrase designed to drive it home that things were different now. We were on the bus. I was going on and on about Pisces, reading things from my astrology book, and Iris seemed more and more frightened as I expounded on how inherently hopeless it was, her nature. It was mapped in the sky that she would never know what she wanted. Pisces, Pisces-rising, Scorpio moon. She was a flooded river with no substance, taking shape only when poured into another vessel. It was futile. Iris looked horrified. I’ll Never Go Out With A Pisces Again, I proclaimed. You’re Worse Than Geminis. The final astrological insult. We climbed off the bus at Market and the walk into the Mission consisted of my trashing the fish and Iris quite despondent, asking, What can I do? I think I suggested therapy. I could not understand why she didn’t want to be with me. I was so nice to her, I really cared about her. I loved her, and we had fun together. We had plans. We were going to go to Europe together. I was going to get an eleven thousand dollar Astrea grant for Emerging Lesbian Writers and take her band on tour. I was generous. I bought her a sixty dollar lava lamp for Xmas. I bought her a pierced nipple, and that tattoo from Georgia—those twin fish swirling around the cursed number thirteen. I increased her coolness, I nurtured her, and she abandoned me for a bland little twit who was very invested in being femme. Humiliating.