Valencia

by Michelle Tea

  Later I went over to the Mexican place on Valencia with the bad food and the good margaritas. I had eaten there once with Iris, after I had taken us shopping at the cheesy leather store across the street. We got nachos and slushy margaritas and we chewed and screwed, ran laughing and out of breath from smoking down this little alley and I hit her with our new riding crop. This kind of public sex and general scamming would never happen with Cecilia and I knew that was part of the problem. I was looking for someone who got into more trouble than I did, or who at least was open to getting into whatever trouble I could come up with. No trouble for Cecilia. Those days were over. She told me bunches of stories, about riding home on her bike with a beer stuffed in every pocket, slugging one back as she rode. All the times she smashed her car and kept going. Now she was in the Twelve Step program and being good. She was being more and more good each day. She had quit her bike messenger job and was working as a yoga instructor. She dressed a little tamer, no more wild dry mane of black and red rocker girl hair, scruffy sweaty clothing. I was glad Cecilia did what she needed to do to save herself, but I couldn’t shake the feeling of missing out on something. She wouldn’t have sex with me in public bathrooms. Little things like this haunted me. I was only twenty-five.

  In the margarita place I found Rachel eating nachos by the pinball machines at the back. She had a glass of water and two books, On Being a Jewish Feminist and the Bible. Rachel’s thin brown curls had gotten long since I last saw her. She’d been going out with some really insecure woman from Marin who wouldn’t let her have friends. She got a new job at a methadone program and stopped smoking pot because she felt guilty—why should she have her high when others couldn’t have theirs? Rachel was an Aquarius. People kept popping in for margaritas, people we knew. Rhonda showed up, full of complaint about this girl Leona, me and Rachel knew her too. Rhonda bitched about how Leona was so weird to her the other night, and we all talked about how weird Leona always was, and I offered that she had been really unsupportive of my writing and everyone agreed that that was really lousy. Whenever people had a complaint to offer they would take a greasy tortilla chip from the wooden bowl on the table and place it on their shoulder. The margaritas were beautiful, thick and cold, pale green. I took the lime wedge from my edge of the glass and scooped up some icy froth, sucked it into my mouth. A shallow plate with a thin layer of creamy guacamole, a plastic bowl of watery red salsa, chunks of onion and soggy leaves of cilantro. Rocco stopped by, and told us how he had had a tantrum about his roommate, and the phone was off the hook and she was still on the line and heard everything and now she was moving out, which was great because now Rhonda could take her room. Rocco wasn’t sorry. He sold cars, Saturns. He really loved it. He toasted me and called me “Comet” and I felt like a poseur. I wasn’t a comet. I was a wife. I was drained and jaded and I was only twenty-five. How did it happen? The tequila was working its unpredictable intensity on me. I wanted to Fuck Shit Up. We paid the bill and walked over to the open mic at the bar down the street, some girls we knew were reading. Actually just one girl since the other girl had canceled with a hangover. The girl reading seemed ill at ease, like she wished she hadn’t gotten herself into it. She gave me a drink ticket, which was great since I only had two dollars left. I got one of those beers with a lemon. The bar was dark and crowded, lots of red, shiny stars hanging from the ceiling, velvet paintings. The stage where the poets stood had fire painted on the wall. The girl poet stood up there and smoked furiously and read her poems. I hate reading because it interferes with my smoking, she said. I remember last winter she was sick forever and everybody was worried about her because she kept smoking and smoking. I was smoking too. Other people’s cigarettes. I knew I was drunk when my reactions to the readers got so violent. I loved that one boy so much! Really great. I tried to explain why he was so great to all my friends but they didn’t get it. His simple beauty. I gulped my beer. Most of the readers were bad. I tried heckling but I was off, I was being sarcastic but people thought I meant it. Kim read, and that was good. Kim was this really cute girl, short black hair, shiny, bangs cutting across her forehead. Some makeup but I think she was butch. I mean, I was attracted to her so I figured she was. But her shirt was always tucked in, which made me think she was probably a Virgo or some other incompatible sign. Kim liked me back when she had a girlfriend and I was free, and now I had one. She would read at my open mic, drunk lesbian sex stories, my favorite. You could tell she was young, and probably a mess. Just the other night Sam and I were trying to figure out if she was always blacked out at the bars. There was something weird and unfocused about her, and every week she would introduce herself to me all over again as if she had no memory of the week before. I watched her sit against the bar and drink beer and smoke long white cigarettes. There was an aura of anxiety about her. She was attentive to all the readers, you could tell she really believed in poetry. I drank my beer and stared at her more and more openly. I thought about going out with Kim. What would it be like? Being drunk all the time, real passionate about writing. Lots of making out in bars and bathrooms, then sloppy drunk fucking at home, late. Or not, because she would be in a blackout. Can you fuck in a blackout? Her friend saw me staring. She whispered to Kim. Kim seemed to be using the corners of her eyes, she looked nervous. I just continued to stare, harder and harder, until she turned her resistant head and looked straight at me. I smiled a lazy smile. She turned away quickly. I bummed another cigarette. I imagined Kim grabbing me and kissing me. I decided I would kiss her back. I had never cheated on a girlfriend, I was very righteous about it, but then I thought, what if it was something I was supposed to experience in this life? Cheating was a very common experience. I would kiss Kim a little and then push her away and yell No! having it both ways. A moment of indulgence before coming to my senses. I had a girlfriend. A really nice one. A good, miso soup when you’re sick, you need a backrub kind of girlfriend. I was an asshole. A drunk one, the worst kind. My beer was over and I had no more money and all the girls I knew were leaving. Including Kim. I got up to hug her goodbye. Here. She gave me a little scrap of paper. I still want to have coffee with you, and write. Here’s my number. Oh, Yeah, I said. I’m Always Going Writing Alone, I Need Writing Buddies. She pressed the scrap into my palm. And I’m not hitting on you, I know you really like Cecilia. Oh, I laughed, punched her arm. Bye! I walked down the street, kicking the trash in my path. I was so fucked up. I looked at my reflection in the shop windows. My hair looked really good. Green, and kind of big. The wind flipped it all over my head. I imagined Kim on the sidewalk behind me, watching me walk away. At home Sam was just waking up, groggy in the hallway in her blue Superman bathrobe. I showed her Kim’s number scratched on the torn paper scrap, and boom, another outburst. I Don’t Know, I’m So Confused, If Only I Really Knew. Whenever I Think About Breaking Up I Think No, I Love Her, But I Think About Staying And I Feel So Restless. Sam looked disturbed. I’m sure she did not want to hear this. I hopped in the shower and when I got out Cecilia was there, in my house, and again I felt like an idiot. Maybe I would stay with her forever. She was so nice. We sat in my bed and talked about writing, I untied her shoes and yanked them off, little black canvas things. We curled up into each other on my crummy futon, under my blankets. My room was filthy. We went to sleep.

  21

  I need to bring you back to my first date with Iris. It seems that I’m not done with her yet. It wasn’t really a date, we were both too skanky for dates. We got a big glass jug of beer, malt liquor for a buck and a quarter, and sat on the curb outside the rock show, trying to figure out a way to replicate the admission stamp with spit or a sharpie. Before we got on the bus that dragged us into the fog-soaked Haight she’d said, I’m really selfish, and I looked at her pretty wet eyes and laughed like she was a skinny girl bitching about the fat on her hips, because she was much too cute to be an asshole and plus I am a fool for love.

  Iris ran away from the South in a dust cloud of drama. Magdalena Sq
ualor had brought her to San Francisco from Georgia. When Iris and Magdalena were girlfriends they had driven in a van across the whole country and never spoken. They’d sat in the thin ice of silence and slept on the shoulder of the road. In Santa Cruz they found a room way up in the trees, and Iris got a job at a vitamin factory and Magdalena worked at a cafe, and there they stayed with nothing to do. Together they cooked cauldrons of vegetarian chili and sold it to hippies at Dead shows; they combed the woods behind their house for brambles and wove wreaths to sell to catalogue companies. They seduced this girl who looked like k.d. lang and the fallout had driven Iris deeper into her destiny, to my city where she left her van in the street to be cracked open and dragged away. Magdalena Squalor hadn’t let Iris drink, hadn’t let her smoke cigarettes or pot from a bong, so I got to be the bad girl who freed her, the good nasty girl, the whore with a bed of pills and cherries. The grandmother who doesn’t have to live with the brat, who comes and takes the brat to bowling alleys and the bright aisle of a Woolworths with a pocketful of dollars. I took the brat through the dark streets of the city I had owned first and we sucked from glass bottles, hands twisting the sacks around the necks into paper flowers. We fucked in bathrooms and alleys bold as boys, bent over porcelain sinks that creaked from the wall with the weight of her hand inside me. The rustle of clothes and rats, clink of belt buckles and feet on broken glass. When someone saw us by accident, I let them be embarrassed. Shame was like a dirty tampon pulled from my body and flung in the bucket when I was with Iris.

  Early in our affair I had gone with Iris to the outdoor cafe to meet Magdalena Squalor. I hadn’t needed to talk at all, I was so smug. My scrawny arms had dangled like bones in my shitty t-shirt and my hair was terrible. There sat Magdalena and I hadn’t wanted to like her. She was the birth mother who maybe wanted her baby back, and even though the baby wanted to stay with me you know the justice system sucks. I kept her and fed her as long as I could, and when she went away it wasn’t Magdalena she ran to but that other rotten girl, and only Magdalena knew what it was like to have this baby ripped away when your tits were still heavy and leaking and aching to feed.

  One day, months later, me and Iris and Magdalena Squalor sat with plates of eggs and bread and thick gloppy sauce. Me and Magdalena needed love. Real love, not the watered-down shit that Iris squirted out. Iris was diluted, she had too many girls. Me and Magdalena wrote our personal ads on notebook paper with a purple pen. She had moved herself up from Santa Cruz, and was living in a little pink room in the Tenderloin. We laughed and talked dirty and made fun of Iris, who sulked and drank her coffee. When a cute girl tells you she’s selfish, you better be listening. You better not blink and giggle to show how cute your smile is. When me and Iris roamed the summer, I had hatched plans like hungry children that I could not support alone. We would fly in the sky to other countries, we would crawl along the dust of our own, we would rule the nighttime streets of every city. Those places mewed and scratched at my thighs and now I had nothing to feed them. Magdalena Squalor became my friend. She told me things that made my burning ears sting sharper, but I didn’t want to feel good anyway. I wanted to feel terrible and I did. She told me how Emma took photo booth pictures of herself with no shirt on and gave them to Iris. She told me about a performance where Emma read words from a page while Iris sucked the dildo that hung out of her pants and it sounded so dumb but I was hot with envy anyway. She told me about the pink princess gown Emma wore to the street fair, and how Iris followed her from curb to piss-run curb. Me and Magdalena were in a special club now, and I knew that rotten girl Emma would one day need to be in it too and I for one would slam my door on her. Iris went through girls like a slash-and-burn farmer. All I had to do was lie still as dirt and wait for someone to bounce seeds off my chest.

  Magdalena Squalor walked into my house and made me want to paint my eyes. Hers were black as oil beneath the hood, swooping up like wind. I looked at her and knew I must change my clothes because Magdalena Squalor knew true glamour. A thick beauty that is hurt and needing, a syrup too sweet and heavy to drink without liquor. I dressed in my closet, we were going to a party. I spread cards on the floor to tell Magdalena her future. Magdalena looked hard at the cards but they didn’t tell her what she was looking for. Magdalena needed paper pictures of green things growing, of big-bellied women, because she was trying to have a baby. For real, a secret. I’ll tell you my secret, she said, but if you don’t like it you have to shut up because I don’t want to hear it. She was tracking her belly’s dark comet so that she knew when to do it. She planned to seduce the man who gave her tattoos, breathe on his neck as he leaned between her legs, his gun at her breasts. A prayer like black ribbon across her skin. The man was a gangster, had pointed true guns at shopkeepers and left with bags of cash. He had a little boy so you knew his parts worked ok. But there was nothing like a baby in Magdalena’s cards. We walked to the store and bought the worst drinks we could find, malt liquor flavored with synthetic pineapple and cherry. I wanted to be there when Magdalena’s baby came, hold it wet and confused, beating against my chest like a bird. Magdalena told me about all the girls who hated her, all her enemies, the catty girls who hissed in each other’s ears when Magdalena trailed her scent past them. Junked-up girls who would beat her up because someone told someone that she was a little bitch, a crazy bitch, and those girls were just sitting there high with nothing to do. Magdalena was going to tease her hair into a bubble like the cholla girls do, with evil-edged razors slid in like bobby pins, and I would dash my bottle at the tip of the curb and hold its liquored edges to some girl’s throat, I swear I would. Me and Magdalena drank our awful bottles and went to the party and Cecilia was there. She didn’t know that my heart was a sand-storm waiting to open her skin in a desert of cuts. She didn’t know the animal that waited in my stomach, silently shredding the walls. For her my heart wore small white shoes and carried a purse, went to bed early. I wanted to shoot myself into her arms so she understood the need to crash cars with me, to tear up pavement because we were beautiful.

  Magdalena Squalor lived in the worst part of town. All by herself in a little room, and outside her window the terrible things people do were demonstrated nightly in the streets, while immigrant families slept close on pushed-together cots. I walked to her apartment with bottles of that sweet awful drink. One for me, one for Magdalena. She was moving away. Back to the South where the houses had big porches and you could sit with a baby and rock and rock. She was selling everything. When I got there girls were loading shelves into the hall, pulling the fat lazy futon across the floor, dismembering the frame. I sat on her floor and stacked books. I took the bed-sheets that bitch ex-girlfriend gave her. Not that one, a different one. Aren’t they all bitches. I took a green sweater too scratchy to wear, and the worn country shirt that slipped off my shoulders. I took the thick-heeled jelly shoes that didn’t fit me. I took the black shoes she had worn on her wedding night, when she married the gay boy who needed to stay in the country. The black shoes didn’t fit either, but I wore them. I took a little aquarium for my roommate who caught cockroaches and kept them as pets. I took Magdalena’s little blue suitcase with a mirror on the inside, and I took her curling iron. One day my hair will be long like Magdalena’s, and I will wind the locks around the hot stick and listen to them sizzle. One day I will braid my hair stiff at my neck like Magdalena, who is never happy. In the South she slits her wrists daily and drips the blood into the tank of her Camaro. She takes care of other people’s babies. Magdalena Squalor, I will meet you in the dirtiest city you can dream of. We will drink cocktails so sweet they pucker our cheeks, as we perch on cracked leather bar stools. I will buy you plates of calcium and protein and we will run through the streets in excellent danger.

  acknowledgments

  Millions of thank-yous go out to Jennie, Kate and all the lovely ladies at Seal, to Inga Muscio, to the most amazing Eileen Myles, to Sash Sunday and Sini Anderson, and to Ginger Robinson.

&nbs
p; © LYDIA DANILLER

  about the author

  Michelle Tea is the author of several books, including The Chelsea Whistle and the illustrated Rent Girl. Her novel, Rose of No Man’s Land, was declared “impossible to put down” by People magazine. Her writing has been published in The Believer, The Best American Erotica, The Best American Non-required Reading, and The Outlaw Bible of American Literature. She was voted Best Local Writer of 2006 by the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Tea is the founder of the all-girl performance happening Sister Spit, and artistic director of Radar Productions, a nonprofit that stages underground, queercentric literary events in the Bay Area and beyond.