Valencia

by Michelle Tea

  We must have slept only an hour or two when Iris’s roommates woke us up. There was a brunch, and then we were all supposed to ride with Dykes on Bicycles in the Pride Parade. I was still drunk when I woke up, sick but with all this hazy energy. I had to go back home to change. Laurel had spent the night on the extra futon in Iris’s kitchen and she was still drunk too. We stumbled home through the Mission together, stopping for coffee and carrot juice and a bagel I could hardly get down. Out in front of Esta Noche, drag queens were teetering into a decorated convertible. Their makeup was detailed and flawless. They must have gotten up at dawn. Back at my house I found a message from Willa on the answering machine, saying venomous, unbelievably mean things. It was horrible, the things she was saying. Why don’t you write a fucking poem about it! I was so upset, I sat on the toilet crying and Laurel assured me that yes, my ex-girlfriend was crazy but I should just get over it because we were late for the parade. I got up and wiped my face and changed into my marvelous Pride Day outfit, a yellow terry cloth sundress, strapless, with rainbow elastic that held it to my body. I had big purple hair, a green studded collar and roller skates. I looked insane. The guy at the BART station wouldn’t let me on wearing the skates so I had to ride the train in my socks.

  Market Street was mobbed, it was wonderful. I was overwhelmed with tender feelings for my community, but I also hadn’t slept and was seriously worried about not making it through the parade. Laurel had her bike and no shirt on. She had stickers saying This Is Sexist stuck over her nipples. We waited at the front of the parade and watched Dykes on Bikes roar by, then jumped in with Dykes on Bicycles, pedaling behind the motorcycles like little sisters. Ashley had a milk crate rigged to the back of her bike. I grabbed it and she pulled me the whole length of Market Street. We were a fabulous team, people were cheering. I managed not to wipe out, though it was scary going over the grates. Iris was there on her bike, topless, turning around and grinning at me. Willa was also there, pretending I didn’t exist. Fine. If she wanted to act like a child, that was fine. Down by the water where the parade ended I drank more beer, got stoned, managed to digest a veggie burger and some rice, and left. I went home to change into something less ridiculous, shoes without wheels. I dragged Iris with me. She collapsed on my futon with an astrology book. She was reading Aquarius and verifying my personality. She wanted to take a nap. No Way, I said, and put on Live Through This, loud. There was a free Tribe 8 show back at the parade, we had to catch it. Come On, Get Up, You Just Need Some Coffee. I threw on a housedress with a Strawberry Shortcake pattern. You know, the cartoon character. Come On Now, Get Up. Iris looked kind of sick, but I was determined to get the most out of this weekend. We got tall cups of iced coffee and headed back down toward the water. We stopped at a liquor store, which was out of beer, amazing us, but I grabbed some whiskey and stuck it in the pocket of my housedress. I can’t believe I’m with a girl in a Strawberry Shortcake housedress with a pint of whiskey hanging out of the pocket, Iris smiled, like she was dreaming an entertaining little dream. I was happy to be with a girl who appreciated such things.

  What a blurry weekend. We missed most of the concert, went back to the Mission for more beer and coffee. I changed again and we went to Willa’s bar in the lower Haight. A real dive of a bar, dark and cramped with girls. Something was always wrong with the toilets. You’d wait in line forever, bursting with piss, and once inside the smelly little room you’d see that the bowl was thick with soaked clouds of tissue. One time I pulled up my skirt and sat on the little porcelain sink to piss there, and it fell right off the wall, a heave and a croak and I fell onto the mucky floor, the sink hanging from a broken pipe that spurted water. I pulled down my skirt and left the bathroom. That particular bathroom also had a urinal. One time a girl named Robin Hood tried to teach me to piss into it standing up. It was gross. She did it so well, whipped down her jeans and reached into her pussy like there was a secret button hidden among the folds. She pulled the skin tight, bucked her hips, and piss shot out in a fine, strong stream. Wow, I said. I knew I couldn’t do it. Robin Hood was telling me about a certain muscle up inside me, groggy and underused. If I could find it I could piss a hard arc like she did, and I’d also be able to ejaculate during sex and all kinds of fun stuff. I pulled down the black cotton leggings I wore beneath my dress, a fashion staple since high school. They hung in saggy loops at my ankles. I reached down between my legs and grabbed fingersful of skin and hair, yanked it taut. Come on girl, you can do it! Robin Hood and the five other drunk girls who had crowded inside to witness the spectacle cheered me on. There was an initial, promising squirt and then an infantile dribble of pee that splashed down my thighs and puddled into my leggings. Eeew. Someone handed me toilet paper and I mopped up. Keep practicing, Robin Hood advised, and I did for a while, in the shower and stuff, but I couldn’t get my parts to work right.

  But that night, after the Pride Parade, me and Iris walked gutsy into Willa’s bar, her territory. She was there lining up shots of tequila, she smiled at me all pleasant and friendly. I was dressed up like a superhero, big boots, Wonder Woman underwear, a wig and a gun. I shot Willa. Did I call you last night? she asked innocently. Yeah, You Sure Did. Well, she was blacked out. She didn’t remember any of it. She was full of shit. Ok, Sure, Whatever. We had to have a talk, it was more of a fight. She didn’t want me at her bar with Iris. She wouldn’t come right out and say it, she just made all these impossible rules, like that me and Iris couldn’t dance together or kiss or do anything. I started yelling at her. Why do you always pick a fight with me when I’m working?! she cried. Forget It, I’m Leaving. I grabbed Iris, and we split for this S/M fag club South of Market, very LA and pretentious. I was winding down and beginning to feel sick so we didn’t stay long. Back at my house later I think we just passed out. We had our first sober sex in the morning, and it freaked me out. My hands were confused, used to Willa’s body. I got panicky. I missed my ex-girlfriend. What was I doing? I gave Iris an insincere compliment on the faded daisy tattoo on the back of her shoulder. It was a teenage Bad Judgement tattoo, and I hadn’t noticed it until we were naked and sober together in the afternoon sun of my bedroom. I told her it was cute, and then I told her I had stuff to do, and she left. I called Willa and begged her to go out with me again. I was crying. We got back together, but that didn’t make anything better. We were doomed. I was back in her bedroom with the body I knew and it didn’t mean anything. It was desperation and pure confusion. Iris got really sick from being so fucked up all weekend. She was hypoglycemic, and I hadn’t let her eat or rest. I just kept pumping her full of booze, sex and action, then sent her home to puke, pass out and alarm her roommates into carting her off to General to sit among the rest of the gay revelry casualties. She was lying on a cot with needles in her arms and doctors asking her what were all the dark red marks and scratches at her neck and if she thought she might be pregnant. And she didn’t even know I had broken up with her.

  5

  I almost didn’t eat the mushrooms. Because I was in a performance and I was busy. The performance had a theme and the theme was “pep rally,” and for my perkiness and for my spunk I was chosen to organize a kind of joke cheerleading squad. I had been a cheerleader once, not in high school but in junior high, seventh grade, before cheerleading suggested anything about integrity. I knew some cheers: R-O-W-D-I-E, Devil’s Attack, Uh! Ungawa! Devils Have The Power!, which originally, back in the ’60s, went Uh! Ungawa! People Have The Power! and was a Black Power chant, though nobody told this to the cheerleaders. Imagine having your righteous mantra appropriated by some scrawny shit-town cheerleading squad. For the performance I rewrote Devil’s Attack into Summer’s Here/We’re Glad We’re Queer/Time To Have Fun And Drink Some Beer! I taught all the flailing arms and spread-eagle leaps to my squad, which consisted of Ashley, who was kind of manic, and Bobby, the cross-dressing straight boy who got a lot of play off dykes, and a third girl I didn’t know very well but who was so quiet and introverted that
I worried she’d not do ok with the cheers. Then I thought that was probably a fucked-up cheerleadery thing to think—am I falling into some bad cheerleader mindset? I was rehearsing with my squad in this tiny performance space run by a really cute boy who wore those plastic riot-grrl barrettes in his hair and heavy black glasses on his face and who was always very excited and gushing over everything. He made art with liquid jello and twinkies and pink sugar frosting. On the outside his theater was metallic silver and on the inside it was a one-room schoolhouse or maybe a small chapel, the kind you find in a hospital. Wooden pews against the wall.

  My roommate Laurel came by with Iris. This was about a week after I’d ended the brief but hauntingly passionate affair. And I had ended it so poorly, in her car with the motor running after we’d gone to look at the buffalo in Golden Gate Park. It was weird that there were buffalo in the park. Behind a regular chain-link fence, grazing among the eucalyptus trees that also didn’t belong in San Francisco. The buffalo were thick and morose and their fur was coming off their backs in long strips, like the bark that was falling off the eucalyptus. I’ve heard this shedding is normal for buffalo, but it made them look so mangy and miserable. We stood at the fence and stared at them and then we got back in the car, and Iris dropped me at my house, and I said, Iris, I Can’t See You Anymore, and Iris just looked kind of blank and said, Ok and drove off. I honestly didn’t know what she thought about it, but I figured she couldn’t be too heartbroken if she was willing to do mushrooms with me. You have to be pretty all right with someone to get that unstable around her. I hadn’t ever done mushrooms before. Supposedly they were better than acid, in a hippie way, natural, no rat poison, but I’ve always liked those cramps you get when you’re coming down off LSD. They felt interesting, and made me really know I’d done drugs. I’d heard that mushrooms taste disgusting and I believed it, because even non-hallucinogenic mushrooms made me want to hurl. So earthy and slimy, with that weird texture you feel deep inside your ears as you chew. Like bugs. A taste like mold but worse, human mold, like musty armpits or asscrack. My other roommate, Denise, had the mushrooms. She lived at the end of the hall by the only heating vent, which blew warm air straight into her room and no place else. She brought us a plastic baggie filled with shriveled brown nuggets of fungus. We chopped them up on a cutting board on the counter and ulp swallowed. Not so bad. It took a while to hit so we ate more.

  We sat outside on the front stoop, a great place to sit, maybe the best in the city. You were connected to the absolute hub of 16th Street, but you sat in a dark corridor, apart, quieter, like 16th Street was this incredible secret and my street was the moment before you told it. You had the sense that something was building, sitting in the subtle glow of the streetlights facing the bottlebrush tree sprouting freakish bristly blossoms that actually looked like bottle brushes. I had seen a bottlebrush tree once before, when I was a prostitute in Tucson. I had a call at a hotel by the freeway, and when the guy took off his pants, there was clearly something wrong with his dick, so I left. In the parking lot was the tree. I picked one of the brushes from a branch and put it on the dashboard, where the skinny scarlet needles dried in the Arizona heat and fell off. Now I had one right outside my house, growing all the way up to my window, filling the frame. A great tree. The one from which Laurel hung upside down in the rain the night she learned her friend died from heroin. Laurel was with George that night, who always had a lot of angst, and I had just discovered Eileen Myles. I was reading her little green book at my window when I saw those two moving through the wet night, the street shiny like a polyester shirt, and I yelled down to them, Wait, You Have To Hear This, and I read them “Mai Maison,” my favorite, a kind of reverse serenade, calling the words out my window, and Laurel cried and George smoked a damp cigarette and then Laurel hung by her knees from the bottlebrush tree. The tree also served as a kind of toilet bowl when you were out on the stoop drinking 40s and smoking and felt too sluggish and congested to climb the stairs to the bathroom. Or maybe you didn’t want to miss anything, so you pulled down your pants and squatted over the patch of dirt the tree grew out of.

  So the mushrooms tasted like a trunk of moth-eaten clothes, and after we ate them we went out to the stoop and waited for the world to turn weird. Laurel swinging from the tree again helped, like if we just started acting silly the stuff would kick in faster. We were impatient for the little chunks to get all shot up with acid in our bellies and leak into our bloodstreams. Can You Drink On Mushrooms? I asked. Laurel and Iris shrugged. There’s a whole purist morality that goes along with mushrooms, like it’s so good and holy, unlike LSD or cocaine or Valium, and so you should be holy and ritualistic about it and not wash it all down with beer as if the point were to get bombed, not to have a natural, enlightening experience. I bought my beer at the store around the corner. I liked walking around with the beer in its ratty paper bag. I had a teeny black tape recorder with me so I could record all the amazing things everybody said while they were high. Right when the drug was kicking in, a certain shifting behind the brow, a light zinging down my sternum, we ran into this dancer, Jorge. He was on a bicycle and he talked into the recorder about this sick made-for-TV movie with Melissa Gilbert he’d been watching. It was about rape or incest or forced prostitution or something, I couldn’t figure out which, or how he felt about it. Did it upset him or did he think it was funny or was he just putting on a show for me because he knew I was on drugs? Jorge rode away on his bicycle. He was high, too, on pot. I had him on tape, so I could play the conversation back later and see what it all meant. I thought about all the situations I’ve walked away from that I would never be able to rewind and understand. It gave me a sad and anxious feeling, like when I worried about not having gone to college, and I thought maybe I should carry the tape recorder around all the time. Would my friends find that irritating?

  Me and Laurel and Iris walked toward the Castro, hungry for visuals. We passed a storefront that displayed art made by developmentally disabled adults, and in the window was this big fantastic dragon, dark green goofy with ragged crayola flames and googly eyes and huge teeth and immediately we understood it was some kind of spirit. A power animal or a guide or something. I moved close to the glass, pressing myself against the cold pane. It looked at me, it had such a personality. We Need To Leave It Offerings, I said, and dug through my pockets. I had some change and the jagged cap to my beer. I thought about leaving the change, but I was pretty broke and figured the dragon was a benevolent spirit who loved me and would want me to have my change. The dragon was pleased that I had even considered leaving it my change. I had passed a certain test, like Charlie returning the gobstopper and getting to keep the whole factory. I kept calling the dragon a “she” but that felt like a lie. I tripped on that for a little while. Like, did it need a pink bow on its head for me to really see it as female? But it just looked like a boy to me. A boy dragon. In the Castro we walked into the Baghdad Cafe because Gwynn was working, and I wanted to tell her I was on drugs. She gave me the fattest cinnamon roll, it was like a bed, soft and white with tunnels of cinnamon winding beneath it. You know how you can’t eat while you’re on acid? On mushrooms eating and that kind of stuff seem ok, though the cinnamon roll was more an adventure than anything. I didn’t want to share it with anyone, but I did. I just knew nobody was going to appreciate it as much as I would. Gwynn also gave me a crisp white cup of the coldest, blackest coffee, chunky with ice. It was some sort of juice, I sipped it slowly, feeling the cold stream down my throat. The three of us huddled together on the little stoop in front of the Life Garden and watched everyone. It was nighttime but the shops were still open and the streets were crawling with people. There was a guy selling stuff on the street. We asked if we were in his space. Well now I’d say you’re in your own space. Then, I was in a tiger trap in Nam for ten months, and the cops are going to give me a ci-ta-tion? Fuck the po-lice. Yeah, we all agreed. I tried to smoke but it felt gross, stale and hollow, and I thought maybe mu
shrooms were in fact so holy and natural that they made you want to be that way too. I crushed the cigarette on the pavement and kicked it away. I wished I could get its smell off my hands. It felt gross touching the beautiful cinnamon roll with my dirty cigarette hands.

  What were we going to do? It seemed enough just to be on drugs. We thought maybe we needed to pee, it’s hard to tell when you’re tripping. If you think about it too long you start wondering if perhaps you already did pee, right in your pants, or maybe you’re peeing right now. A girl named Chloe walked by, she had a brown mohawk and a leather jacket with Hopey from Love and Rockets on the back. She was visiting from London, we learned, housesitting around the corner, and we could pee there. On the way we found a box of food. Things like that always happen when you’re on drugs, and it’s so meaningful. It was munchie food, candy and a box of crackers called Chicken in a Biskit. Oh My God, The Boy I Lost My Virginity To Used To Eat Those! What did it mean? The house seemed confusing, too many hallways, a real maze. We contemplated whether we should eat the found food. What if it was a trick? Where did the whiskey I held come from? I took a burning gulp and wondered if I was pushing it. I decided just to hold on to the Chicken in a Biskit, as a kind of talisman. Its meaning would come to me. Are you going to Toybox? Chloe asked. Willa’s bar. Willa who I’d persuaded to go out with me again. Because it wasn’t going so well, I felt I should show up at her bar and pretend to really Be A Girlfriend. I would keep her company while she poured beer from the taps, fetch her cigarettes and go home with her. In my state. Willa wasn’t against drugs, she tripped sometimes, but mostly she was the kind of girl who took care of you while you tripped. Maybe I’ll Swing By, I said casually. You will? My drug comrades sounded surprised. Maybe a little betrayed. I was abandoning them. Yeah, I Want To See Willa. Iris maybe looked hurt at that. In her face for a minute and then it was gone. Who was Iris? I didn’t really know. I felt peaceful about it. It was fine that I didn’t know who she was. I convinced the druggies to come to Toybox with me. We walked to the Haight, pausing to light cigarettes in doorways, checking if it was still gross to smoke. It was. I had a revelation about everything both being very important and not mattering at all. It was such a beautiful thought. It both pulled you in and released you. Iris agreed, but insisted in an intense voice that there were some things that really were important. She said she didn’t want to bring the trip down but some things just were. Yeah, But Even Those Really, Really Important Things Aren’t. No, she shook her shaggy head, wet blue eyes. Some things are just very important, and she told us about a girl she’d slept with back in Georgia who’d just killed herself and that was what she meant. I felt a little insensitive but silently maintained that even that, in all its importance, was still equally unimportant, and if we each did as that girl had done it would also not matter, ultimately. This didn’t depress me, it felt joyful. It meant that none of us could ever fuck up.