Valencia (10 page)

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.

We were in the lower Haight, the dark corner of Haight and Filmore and ahead was the shitty little dive bar that allowed dykes to plow in each Sunday night, fuck in the bathrooms, pierce and sew their pussy lips on a makeshift stage, all kinds of things going on. Spankings, girls peeling their clothes off on top of the bar. Are You Sure You Want To Come In? Iris and Laurel shrugged. It was important, but it didn't really matter. We pushed into the bar and found it empty, with that cute rocker DJ with the black hair heaving milk crates full of records toward the front. Suzanne was there, and
Willa was clearing glasses from tables. Hi, We're On Drugs, I told her.
Oh
, she smiled this great smile. She didn't care that I was hanging out with Iris, and that was nice. She was a Libra, pretty detached although she had jealous moments, like the day before when she discovered that the box of latex gloves beside my bed was empty.
Did you use them all with Iris?
she cried.
How many times did you guys fuck, like, the whole time?
Not A Lot, I said truthfully.

We left the bar, and our whole bunch walked over to Duboce Park. Suzanne was wearing a wig, a ratty brown and yellow bouffant with a tattered pink bow fixed to the middle. It was pretty great, the Whiskey Wig, we called it. To take a hit of the whiskey you had to wear the wig. We sat on the ground by the swing set and passed the bottle and the hair around, talked into my tape recorder about, you know, childhood teachers who'd hit us or funny stories of being too drunk. Laurel had a great story about smoking crack in an abandoned barber shop with this guy who almost raped her. Everyone had a couple big stories that kind of defined them, and sitting around the dark park, the dead subway tunnel gaping behind us like part of a big face, the shady boys skirting by our small group, checking us out, it was the moment to deliver your stories. Laurel had smoked crack and had been a speed freak plus had grown up poor in Maine picking potatoes with a crazy mother. Willa had been institutionalized and had parents she called “educated poor” and her dad was a minister. Iris was from the South, where she was persecuted in high school and put on Prozac and had a tumultuous
affair with this really controlling girl who brought her to California. Suzanne was the most mysterious, but she had been a heroin addict and used to hit her girlfriend. I of course had been a prostitute, and had a girlfriend go straight on me and a peeping tom stepfather. That was my story. Laurel got on a swing and swung really high, tilting her body backward as she zoomed up. If she had had hair on her head it would have trailed on the ground but Laurel was bald. We were all bald or slowly recovering from recent baldness.
It looks like death!
she howled as she rushed upside down.
It looks like skulls!
I tried it. The oddly lit sand rolled in curves and shadows and did look like skulls. Willa wanted us to have sweaters, worried that we were too cold but didn't know it, being so high. I couldn't tell if this was annoying or sweet. We trudged up sloping Haight Street to her house. Willa turned the heat on right away and went to work toasting us slabs of raisin bread and globbing them with butter. The plump raisins bursting under my teeth were slimy and good. I ate walnuts out of a bag until my mouth stung, sitting on the worn couch in a living room that looked and smelled like that of a very old woman. We sat in the dark. Everyone had plates of warm bread and nuts. Willa moved in and out of the solemn darkness, serving us. I wanted to sleep, not to walk all the way back to the Mission with Laurel and Iris. I wanted to sleep there, in Willa's bed. I did. Laurel and Iris slept on the little living room couch. They were really uncomfortable. When I woke up in the morning in my girlfriend's bed I felt normal, and the girls had gone home, emptying the living room.

6

I may not have any right to talk to you about Suzanne. We were never that close. She was somebody else's friend, big and smiley, and she always told me she liked my poems. In George's bedroom she smeared purple dye on my head with a toothbrush, moving it cautiously over the bristly hairs at the nape of my neck. That night I was reading at an art gallery and she picked through a stack of my bratty rants, selecting which pieces I should perform. She read me a piece of her own, lying on a futon, with Ani DiFranco whining out from the stereo. Her poems were strong, fired with the yearning achy goodness that made her seem young. She'd told us about doing so much heroin back in Seattle, but it all seemed far away from this shiny girl who stuck a nail through her ear and wrote about it while waiting for her food
stamps at 8th and Mission. One night I was at a party with her and other friends, one of those parties you hear about thirdhand and you get there and don't know anyone and the host drunkenly accommodates you and you stake out a little corner and sheepishly drink her alcohol. Actually I think we stole the alcohol. I remember having a heavy bottle of Absolut tucked awkwardly under my jacket and thinking, well if they can afford Absolut then I'm not going to feel bad about swiping it. A Robin Hood gesture, I thought. Walking home, Suzanne kept loudly trying to get me to recite one of my poems, and I was embarrassed.
Come on, please
, she said. We all went back to my house.

That night a prostitute got beaten up in the parking lot across the street from my house. A different night I would've slept through it, it happened at about three in the morning, but we were all there, awake, mixing the stolen Absolut with tap water and ice, sipping it from my roommate Denise's coffee cups. Lulu was there, and Vinnie. George and Brad had gone up to Dolores Park to make out behind the fat leafy palm trees. And Suzanne, we found her later, out front on the sidewalk, sprawled drunk and spinning in her head. We weren't the only ones who heard the woman screaming, a guy a few doors down rushed into the street with a two-by-four held thickly in his hands. He looked bewildered and completely unprepared to use it. I had tried to find a weapon too, but looking around my room saw nothing dangerous and took only my body out into the lot where a pickup truck stuffed
with men peeled out onto 17th Street and a broken-looking whore dripped tears and blood onto the sidewalk. They had raped her, of course. Stabbed her too, in the hand, it looked like, and not too bad, but it was hard to tell because she was fucked up and freaked out, one minute doubled over and howling like a shot animal, then sprinting away like she was scared we'd hurt her too. We told her we'd help her, told her we'd take her to the hospital, and when she said she wanted to just go home we told her we'd take her there. She slung her thin arms around my and Lulu's shoulders and we walked her toward Mission, pausing when she stopped to double over again and scream. Vinnie walked to the side, uncomfortable and scared, and the blood from the woman's hand dripped onto my shirt. At Mission Street a cop car pulled up and the woman spun her head to them, her crazy red face streaked with tears and makeup, yelling
Where were you when I needed you! Where were you when they. . . . you don't give a fuck about whores!
She was planted on the sidewalk in her worn-down heels and I was trying to steer her away from the slowing cruiser. Come On, It's Ok, We'll Get You Home. The cops drove up onto the sidewalk, flew out of the car, left the door open so you could see the lights blinking on the dash, hear the sputtery static voices from the radio.
What's the problem here. Does she need medical attention? What's going on? You don't give a fuck about me, fuck you!
Come On, I whispered, and to the cops, She's Fine, She's Not Hurt Bad, We're Going To Take Her Home.
She may need medical
—GET THE FUCK AWAY
FROM ME! We'll Take Her To The Hospital If She Needs To Go, Really.
Come on, I think you should come with us
. GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME! Hey, She Doesn't Want To Go With You. Her arm was wrapped around my shoulders, her fingers clutching. She Was Just Attacked, Leave Her Alone.
Let go of her
, said the cop. There were two of them, both men, mustaches, the blue shirts, the hats, the waists hung with guns and cuffs and other coply accessories. They told me I was interfering with an officer. Don't You Get It? I was crying. She Was Raped, She Doesn't Want To—The cop just grabbed her, pulled her arm off my shoulders, and the other moved behind me and scooped my arms up behind my back and held them there, painful and immobile.
Now you just calm down
, he said to me, while the other shoved her screaming into the cop car. Let Me Go! I was screaming too, Let Me Go, I've Done Nothing!
It's ok, Michelle, it's ok
, Lulu said gently, crying, telling the cop to let me go. You Are Going To Hell! I screamed at the cop holding me. It was all I could think to say, watching the other pig stuff the bleeding woman into the car. You Are Going To Hell! I screamed again and again like a crazy woman. Another cop car pulled up to the curb and yet another cop climbed out, a woman, sent to calm me down.
Now just calm down
, she said,
calm down
. You Tell Him To Let Me Go, I said to her, my jaw tight.
Now you just calm down
, she repeated,
and he'll let you go
. Fuck You, I said.
Thank you!
yelled the prostitute from the window as the cop car pulled out into the street.