After I adopted myself into Kate’s family, I got invited to Redway instead of going to the poor camp. Redway looked a lot like a campground and had rope swings that hung from redwoods. There was a dirt trail with wobbly wooden steps leading to the Eel River. In the car with Kate and her sisters, we sang commercial jingles like, “Don’t give me that so-so soda, the same old Coca-Cola, I wanna rock and roll-a.” We’d go back and forth like that, first Shasta then Tab, “For beautiful people.”
To become a beautiful person, I barfed two or three times per day. I had red sores on the knuckles of my right hand from rubbing against my teeth. They’re now little white scar-slivers where I picked the scabs and didn’t let them heal. No matter how much I barfed, no matter how much Jazzercise I did, I was never going to be skinny, but it wasn’t only about the weight. Bulimia was about control, which I was always on the brink of losing.
I barfed up every meal and guzzled hard alcohol with Diet Sprite. Alcohol was easy enough to find—the fully-stocked bar downstairs in my house, where neighborhood drunks hung out and played liar’s dice with me, and sometimes Alan, when he was avoiding Dad and his new family. Mom and Chris kept the whiskey flowing, so I poured the gin or rum into a glass and added water to the bottle to fill the gap I left. They’d never notice the difference. I drank alone in the dark, keeping both barfing and booze secret.
At Kate’s cabin, I was nervous to barf because I was worried she’d hear me and get upset or send me home. It was close quarters, so I snuck into the bathroom when it was empty and the rest of Kate’s family was at the river, worried they would hear me retch. It was close quarters and I had little privacy, while at home I was left alone and there were several bathrooms where I could hide, run water, and puke my heart out. No one was ever around.
With television as my very best friend, I knew every commercial by heart. I was delighted to chew Freshen-Up gum that exploded in my mouth and knew every word to every Blondie and Prince song. Singing was like praying. With music as my mouthpiece, Madonna and Prince expressed my emotions for me. I was spawned by MTV, absolutely brainwashed by Madonna’s sloppy bawdiness and Catholic pageantry. I studied her songs, gyrated to “Burning Up For Your Love,” and stole gobs of plastic bracelets from Woolworth’s that covered my forearms. I sported black lace fingerless gloves to hide the scars. I was determined to have sex, but I’d only kissed boys. Girls were easier to get close to, and although I thought about it, I didn’t kiss them until later on. Since my mom wouldn’t allow me to date until I was sixteen, I developed a knack for lying and sneaking.
By the time I was fourteen, I was already enjoying attention from boys, but I had no idea what to do about it. Kate and I went to private Catholic school together for the first seven years, until we decided that wearing uniforms sucked. Public schools had boys and fashion, punk kids and no mandatory mass. Our parents eventually caved to our pleas. In public school, the boys I flirted with pinched my butt and gave me mean looks. They nudged me, kissed me, then ran away.
Rudy Geraldi was an olive skinned dreamboat who made all of us laugh. I had a terrible crush on him. He was tall and mature, seventeen years old with even teeth. Us girls—Kate, Sandy, Jolie, and I—planned a sleepover at Rudy’s place while his family was away. We drank his parents’ vodka and played music and danced around with our elbows out and our knees weak in the summer heat. I got shitfaced with Kate, and we got loud and ridiculous. I was a stupid, reckless drunk, singing my commercial jingles and dancing around, hating my body, but I barely remember this. I do remember the beds outside where we slept. They were old iron frames with striped mattresses that smelled like bug spray and suntan lotion. I wore turquoise and purple plaid preppy shorts and a sky blue Izod shirt. “Is this okay?” He asked. Tongues, lips, no bra. Shorts sliding down past my knees. The sky shimmered with blurry lights, like water with eyes. “You must be my Lucky Star,” I said, moving my arms up in a sloppy cheerleader move.
“Are you sure?” Rudy asked. I remember the question but not the answer. Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” played over and over, someone had put it on repeat and then passed out. His hair was fine and silky. I shrunk when he was on top of me, finally the thin girl I wanted to be—under a big black sky that was asking, “Are you sure?”
My tongue must have tasted rotten with vodka and my teeth rancid from puke. If there was pain, it was an echo of a Shasta soda pop commercial, a crinkle of tin. “I want a thrill, I want a wow, I want that taste I want it now.” The music faded and the stars blurred. I remember the musty smell of damp Redwoods and little else. When I woke up, my head pounded. There was a bump the size of a walnut on the back of my head where I must have hit it against the headboard. I looked down. There was blood dripping down my legs, running down my thighs. Rudy was asleep next to me with his back to me. The mattress springs dug into my back. I found my crumpled T-shirt and pulled it over my naked body and went to find Kate and Sandy.
“What happened?” Sandy asked, seeing the blood.
“I think we did it,” I said. “Please don’t tell Kate.” I was embarrassed, ashamed, and scared. I held my sore head in my hand. I found my plaid shorts under the bed. They were also bloody. I went inside the bathroom and watched my highlighted hair fall into the toilet water as I puked. I thought about Tab Cola, with just one calorie for beautiful people—like me. I felt light headed and held the toiled bowl sides to keep from falling. My head ached. I was losing weight. I rinsed my baggy, wrinkled, damp shorts in the sink. I could throw up, but I could never take it back. I reached for the pink can of Tab, swallowed it, and made Rudy my boyfriend until he wasn’t.
Part 2
“Killing me.”
7
I met the orchid breeder at the coffee shop in Old Town, Eureka, which was packed with hippies and artists. I’d gotten out, away from my mom and step-dad and dad and was living on my own by seventeen. Being a barista was one of my many shit jobs, which led to another shit job: artist’s model. Some of my customers hired me to pose nude for them—for an untaxed hourly wage—in studios and warehouses nearby where they painted or sketched. I stood or sat naked, and they collected money in a basket like church and gave it to me afterwards.
A squat man with a posture like he’d just had a prostate exam asked me for a small coffee. “You’re fetching,” he said. His shiny black hair hung in his bulging eyes. He brushed it away.
“Thanks.” I handed him a white mug of burnt coffee. He gave me his business card, which read: Orchid Breeder. Painter.
“You should sit for me,” he said.
I shoved the card in my sock. The café was packed, with a line out the door. Two craggy men in plaid flannel shirts played chess and camped out. Shop owners left with their trays of lattes and muffins and four local punks occupied their usual table.
“Will you turn the music up?” the one with spiky purple hair asked.
I walked in the back and turned up David Byrne’s “The Catherine Wheel” and emptied the tip jar in my apron pocket. I had to pee.
I poured coffee grounds in the trash, wiped counters, and cut up blackcurrant scone samples. I popped one in my mouth. I needed to scratch together enough cash to get out of this cow town. I was feeling cramped and lonely. Maybe I needed to go to San Francisco where I could do what I want without being watched like a hawk by people who knew me my entire life. Ten bucks a day in coffee tips wasn’t cutting it. I called the orchid breeder’s number.
“Can you model for me tomorrow for a few hours?”
“How much?” I asked.
“Fifteen an hour,” he said.
I met him in a dusty attic loft in Old Town, with creaky redwood beams and orange light spilling through the windows. I was about twenty. The orchid breeder was thirty-six with a fixed, tense expression and frog-like eyes that never blinked. He smoked cigars and painted on a canvas with a couple of skinny branches that he dipped in muddy red paint.
&n
bsp; “Have you ever done acid?”
“Nope.”
“How is that possible? A fetching girl like you?” He opened and shut the freezer and handed me a tiny, white piece of paper, which dissolved on my tongue. We spent the next several hours touching and kissing. I got lost standing up. Time became syrup I couldn’t move through. My gut was empty. I loved every last minute of it.
That was how the affair started. Not with mutual attraction or interests—the married man had the yummy drugs; he had the drug that made everything perfect, not just acid. He bought perfect powdered speed by the quarter baggy and fed it to me off his red kitchen counter; it made my soul swim. Crank was the answer to a question I didn’t know I had. It made me frantic and thin and euphoric. I snorted a line and soared skinless and weightless and looked down in a jagged disconnect. Did I mention speed made me skinny? Perfect.
The orchid breeder was married to a woman named Kayla. What I knew about Kayla was that she was delicate, pretty, and blonde. And that she had been raped. I didn’t know what it meant to leave a wife, especially one who had been raped, but I’m sure Kayla still has a doll in my likeness with pins stuck through its eyes.
One afternoon, the orchid breeder called. He was puffing on a cigar and asked, “Do you want to come to San Francisco?” Of course I did. This hick town was tightening around my neck. The alcohol and bars and acid trips were making me late for work. I was one write-up away from being fired. So I packed some clothes and books and climbed inside his U-Haul with his two dogs and my silver spray-painted bookshelves.
8
“Stop moving,” he said. The orchid breeder must’ve painted my pussy seventy times. I shifted in the white lace doily he liked me to wear like a skirt. I kept rubbing my thighs because I had goose bumps. After these modeling sessions—in the cold motel room we were renting by the week—he would drive us around San Francisco in his baby-shit-brown Gremlin with bullet holes in the door while we looked for an apartment. But first, we found his dealer. Fritz was always on the corner of Haight and Fillmore. Fritz and the orchid breeder knew each other from college in Boston where they played in a Hawaiian Frank Sinatra cover band. Fritz was a balding guy with frizzy clownish curls who leaned forward so much it looked like he walked on his tiptoes. We bought two quarter baggies and then looked in the Bay Guardian for an apartment. After we’d been tweaking for two days, we settled on a warehouse space that used to be a Corn Nuts factory. We carried his hard, dusty futon into the one musty room and fucked while his eyes bulged like a goldfish. White, powdered speed filled our days and animated our nights. I lived on a diet of meth, hard, dry oatcakes and oranges. After we’d snort the drugs, we’d soak the baggies in our coffee, have line after line, and fuck; he painted wide strokes of labia, one hand pressed down on me like a stop sign. Then another line for dinner.
In the orchid breeder’s paintings, I was a riddling sphinx, my face a box of shadows. His silkscreen paintings were pastel layers of pink and gray outlines of my thighs, face, and hands. They were muted layers around a blurry face and long, masculine fingers. The paintings were terrible, lousy, worse than lousy, but you can’t tell your boyfriend his paintings suck. He couldn’t capture me because I wasn’t there. I’d morphed into something else, tiny shards of fragments: an arrow, a train, watery edges of labia. I took myself away, fragment by fragment, until I was gone.
A couple weeks after we moved into the Corn Nuts factory, we drove his car to the Mojave Desert. He fed me ecstasy on the way there, which meant he had to pull over a couple of times and let me barf. We walked in long shadows, sweaty and glistening, touching but not connecting in the heat.
“You have daddy issues,” he stared ahead, angry with me out of the blue.
“Look at all of them,” I said. He clammed up. I planned my escape while the dust became bubbles inches in front of my face. I tried to bite them: daddy issues in translucent balloons. “They’re flying.”
We walked in the shadows of the tall cacti. A stick shifted in the shade, which was actually a rattlesnake. It wiggled like a violent wave and shook its rattle. My knees were liquid. I fell back onto a rock as it curled its way away—the same way Mom collapsed the day Dad left.
We camped in sand. A man shook his gun at us in the middle of the night. “Dad?” I bolted up.
“This is private property,” the man yelled.
I followed the orchid breeder back to his car where we slept. The next day, his car wouldn’t start. It was over a hundred degrees. While we were stranded in the desert, his two dogs ran away. Soon after that, I ran away, too. I found a dinky basement apartment where I wouldn’t have to share my speed.
9
Exodus was the only lesbian sex club in town, and my crotch tingled with the possibility of sex with a woman. I walked through the Mission in San Francisco in giant Olive Oyl platform shoes and leopard-print faux-fur shorts. Black halter. Bright red lipstick. Sometimes, I wore a less glamorous outfit: ripped jeans, wife beaters, and Oxblood Doc Martens. Fake eyelashes thick as furs and old lace slips ratted to shreds, but I was anti-glam grunge, a faded Xerox of the drag queens sashaying in my midst. I was on my way to score meth when I met Bianca.
Bianca looked at me. She wasn’t an artsy film student who had an accident with a bottle of Manic Panic. She was a dapper girl-boy: tall and lean with fine brown hair and skin the color of Colorado snow. Her sad brown eyes pulled me home when I curled around her. “Ennui” was tattooed in Courier font on her freckled bicep. She tasted like Mountain Dew and was dressed like a forties gentleman in a light green vintage button up shirt and navy suspenders. Men’s shoes. Men’s socks. Sly smile. I contemplated suicide when she left my side to move quarter baggies around town. Not because I was worried she’d get busted for dealing, but because she was a flirt and I was a jealous bitch. I wanted the speed to melt us into drippy lesbian porridge. I fantasized about living with her in a log cabin near a river where she’d smoke a pipe in a rocking chair and I’d wear fifties frocks and learn to knit. We’d slow dance to Etta James in the kitchen with the smell of sweet potato pie baking.
That’s not what happened.
I still posed naked for live drawing classes at the Mission Cultural Center, where I wrapped myself around a chain from the ceiling for hours, sweating for a bump on my ten-minute breaks. “You have a reputation for being late,” I was told by pissed off instructors. They handed over my cash and never hired me again.
I always got lost on the way to gigs, except when I rushed to Guerrero Street, back to Bianca. The sharp edge of longing scratched my brain while I drove the wrong way down a one-way street. I couldn’t make rent and I didn’t give a shit.
But I always found Bianca.
We bought our product from the same clan of fashionable bald fags on Sixteenth Street. They kept the drag queens supplied. Bianca served the lesbians. She also played guitar and sang like Kristin Hersh. She walked into the room and my leg bounced nonstop. I got love spasms. I’d dated women, but this was deeper than sex. This was fucking speed sex.
In our dealer’s apartment, she swaggered all cool breezes with a copy of J. D. Salinger’s Nine Stories in her back pocket. I sat in a zebra print chair with the Angry Women anthology and two hairless cats. They wiggled their tails in my face like eels. I was having a love affair with ideas about women and power and sex, ideas Bianca and our dealer had introduced me to. We talked about it like something that was borrowed from a phallic legacy. Woman was a set of symptoms, an “other” to man. The woman in front of me was making me tingle.
I bedded Cixous and her affirmation of hysteria: an inherently revolutionary hiccup in the binary logic of conformity and Christian law. I got behind her agenda to break up continuities and responded to intolerable emergencies with hysteria. I fell for a feminism that encompassed biotechnics and platform Mary Janes, all facets of technology, with a keen interest in exploring the things so many of us in San Francisco wan
ted to explore at that time: artifice, Baudrillard’s simulacra, Donna Haraway’s cyborgs, and vintage lingerie. I wanted to tear the woman inside me down and rebuild. I wanted to fuck Bianca.
bell hooks seduced me with her language of rage. She shirked victimization and exposed the American Dream in her raw, angry poetry. Terror was the buy message. There was a war on art, drugs, queers, desire, and HIV. There was a war on femininity, a war on feminine sex, and a war on queer sex. The feminism I desired called for a remapping of all of my relationships, the disruption of all officially charted maps. It called into question the possibility of love and lit the match of my lesbian body.
In a moment of clarity, I enrolled at Mills College to do a B.A. in Women’s Studies. I would better myself; create a new self and a future worth aspiring to. It would take two years and more dollars than I could dream of earning, but time and money mattered little in the battle against the Patriarchy. The problem was that the moment of clarity was exactly that, a moment. My lesbian body was disintegrating up a long plastic straw along with my septum.
Bianca and I breathed in the cat piss and bleach smell of meth cooking in the tiny apartment. The fumes were glorious. We barely spoke. There were fresh fat lines to snort instead. We communicated in seismic waves: two phone rings meant “meet me in the parking garage.” We stood there in the amber light and snorted thick chalky shards off glass paperweights and made out on the hood of her Karmann Ghia. We watched the faded sun slip through the windows from the concrete floor. In her garage, we left each other Post-it notes and mixed tapes.
“It’s easy to love the beautiful,” she wrote. “Love people when they’re ugly.”
I became monstrous. Hysterical. Beyond the law. I rode the jagged edge between destruction and redemption. I was anorexic and a speed freak and a homeless bum and a strolling hostess and a bisexual dyke addict.
Spent Page 3