Valencia (11 page)

But really I wanted to tell you about Suzanne, who was passed out on the sidewalk as the cop bound my arms to my back and I screamed. Suzanne, who shared a house with George and with crazy mean Chip who brought tricks home to pay his cheap Mission rent even though everyone knew he had a trust fund. Until everything broke and George moved out, all three of them lived in this house that crawled with cats and drama. George then asked if I would go with him to get his things. Laurel and Iris helped too. It felt like a bad high school hallway, loading out crates of books and blankets while Chip and Suzanne whispered and cackled and hurled things against the wall, making us jump. George decided to leave most of his shit on the curb out front for whoever wanted it. I grabbed some thermals and a blanket. He pulled from his pocket a fat magic marker and wrote Chip Is A Rapist on the sidewalk. George was really into appropriating the word “rapist” and applying it to different circumstances. It was a good word to fling at someone when your feelings were hurt. Suzanne ran down the stairs and shouted all kinds of mean things, not just at George but at Iris and Laurel and me. I guess we became enemies then. It was pretty dumb since we were never super-friendly in the first place. She was this unstable girl who hated me now so ok, whatever. At a Tribe 8 show the next week she tried to get this fucked-up gang of girls to beat up Iris. She was crazy. And then after moving out,
George started talking to her again. I Wouldn't Ever Talk To Her Again, I snapped at him. After How She Treated You? She's A Bitch. George shrugged. I hate when you hate someone in solidarity with a friend, and then they make up and you're left feeling weirdly betrayed and unsure how to act.
She's whoring
, George told me. We were driving around in the silvery-blue station wagon that was his temporary home. He would pull it up to the dunes at Ocean Beach and somehow curl his tall body up in the back and sleep.
She's working on Capp Street
. On The Street? I asked. Jesus, Why Is She Doing That? She Should Work For An Agency, Girls On The Street Aren't Safe. Some freak pulls up and opens the door and that's it.
She says the women all look out for each other
. Still. She Could Get Killed. But she didn't. At a crowded party, I was leaving the bathroom and I walked right into her.
Can I talk to you?
she asked. Sure, I said, apprehensively. The bathroom was dim, lit by a single blue light, and she said,
I've been whoring
. I Know, I said uncertainly. She was crying.
Can I hug you?
She knew that I had worked before too.
I just needed to touch another whore
. Listen, You Should Work For An Agency If You're Going To Work. If Some Psycho Wants To Kill A Woman, He's Going To Pick One Up Off The Streets. I told her about the woman we tried to help months ago, the bleeding lady the cops took away while Suzanne herself lay drunk in the street, feet away. She nodded. She had had a weird trick, she told me, this weird guy. She spent the day with him. Yeah, It's Weird, I said. It's A Weird Fucking Job. The guy was a regular.
Regulars Are Weird, I told her. If You See Someone On A Regular Basis It Turns Into A Relationship. I was hugging her, talking to her, and she calmed down, wiped at her eyes with her wrists. Then she was hostile again. Backed away, her face all stone.
I don't know
, she snapped,
I still have issues with you
. She left the bathroom, shut the door behind her. Fuck you, Suzanne. She needed a whore to hug her while she freaked out and then, fuck off, I'm her enemy again. I barely knew her. She was crazy.

So she was doing heroin again, and whoring on Capp Street. Her roommates kicked her out. They couldn't deal with her friends and her shooting up in her bedroom. At the house meeting she said it was like they were racist, making her leave because she was a junkie. I don't know where she went when she left. And then she died. She was trying to kick and the people at the hospital sent her away, full of malnutrition and hepatitis. She was so sick that she died. She did not OD. The workers at General don't care about junkies, everybody knows that. Her poems were good, I thought. She was young and she'd get older and be different. I had a dream after she died that she brought me to the point of death and then shot me up with electricity, pure sex and oatmeal.
Oh, she ate oatmeal every day
, her friends told me.
She thought it cured depression
. I didn't know that. I barely knew her at all. She was on hold, someone I'd be friends with when she got her shit together. And then she died.

7

On Valencia Street I discovered coffee. Life became expansive, it grew outward. My insides bubbled over onto the Mission streets I walked, high on my new beverage. I hadn't known it was a drug, that you didn't drink it so much as you did it. I had always thought it another bitter beverage that adults drank, like alcohol, only I understood the purpose of liquor, while coffee was a hot, dark mystery, a nasty stew. I don't know why I started drinking it except that there were so many coffeehouses in San Francisco and it seemed right to sip the stuff while sitting there, hunched over my papers like all the scruffy students and poets, each at our own round tables with warm cups and purpose. Then
bing wham zip
, my blood became charged, became something else, and I was smarter, my brain some kind of cornucopia
of thought. And I was happier. Not that I had been depressed, but you can always take a good mood a little further. I felt joyful, and excited, very excited, as if the sidewalk outside the cafe were about to erupt into some magnificent carnival and I was on the edge of my seat, brimming with thought, sinking it into my notebook quick before life bumped up against me like a big animal and took me in its jaw. It is a fact that people who drink coffee are less likely to commit suicide. A study somehow came to this conclusion. But Willa was trying to get me to quit my new friend Coffee. She said it made my eyes get all buggy like I was on drugs for real. I am hyper enough already that people have mistaken me for a speed freak and avoided making my acquaintance. Willa was one of those people. I tried not drinking any coffee because she promised that once you got past the first three days off coffee you could wake up in the morning and drink a glass of orange juice and have all this energy and inspiration and it was great. I'd been drinking orange juice off and on my whole life, without coffee, and had never experienced any druglike sensations from it, but since Willa actually started to avoid me during the earlier part of the day, when the effects of the caffeine were strongest, I figured why not give it a try.

I was in the Castro on like the second day without coffee, a beautiful sunny day with millions of gay people shopping and I was walking down Market with Willa and Ashley and I just started sobbing. Everything slowed down like I was sick, talking was hard and not fun, and I hated having to lift my legs to move forward.
It was miserable, life was suddenly terrible and I felt like a chump, like I had been viewing reality through some inauthentic window that made everything look nice when really it wasn't. The worst thing about depression is how true your vision seems, like misery is the only correct perspective and everything you think when you're happy is a sham. I didn't even want to be happy anymore because I'd rather live in honest misery than fake bliss. I cried openly through the throngs of cheerful lesbians and boys with neat haircuts and why does everyone in the Castro look so fucking healthy?
Maybe you should drink some coffee
, Ashley suggested. All this pain just to be more sensitive to the subtle uplift of orange juice didn't seem worth it. I remember Willa was especially unsympathetic. I had a dramatic arm slung around each of their shoulders like the grand martyr, and Willa was obliviously window shopping in the awful stores. Actually she was deeply in love with Ashley and undoubtedly consumed by her own tragedy, but I'll write that book another time. I drank some coffee and my outlook improved immensely. I was ready to write some poems and, I don't know, get drunk, run around, take my shirt off and get kicked out of someplace. You know, live a little. But I wondered about being with someone who tried to stop me from drinking coffee. Once the caffeine hit, the analytical part of my brain went haywire trying to figure out the nature of my so-called relationship with Willa. I'd grill her again and again, arranging everything nicely, intellectualizing it all. But it was getting a little thin. Even I was bored with trying to convince her
that she was in love with me, or that she should be. When I ended our relationship again a month later it was a lot nicer, no swearing or headbanging, civilized. Two caffeinated air signs, me the wired Aquarius, and Libra Willa delicately perky on a little pot of tea. I was haunted by the thought that maybe Iris had been my True Love. What a concept. A
Where's Waldo?
of the heart. I don't buy it anymore, true love. But I decided she was. It had been so passionate, so intense. I had to get Iris back. Would she even have me, after I had put her in the hospital and coldly dumped her in front of the sad displaced buffalo? Lately Iris's house had been the fun place to hang out. The house was unusual for San Francisco in being new, small, with carpet in the bedrooms and linoleum in the kitchen. A regular house, not a Victorian. It had an ugly modern lamp on the ceiling, very bright. This night it was me, Laurel, George, Iris and her roommate Candice, who was still kind of bitchy, but I pretended like we were best pals. It broke her down a little. The other roommate, Lucille, was always depressed and would shut herself in her room and stomp about loudly whenever she heard people having fun. Laurel was mysterious in seeming to give so much of herself away in conversation, yet keeping whole important chunks of herself under wraps. You engaged eagerly in her conversation hoping it would be the moment she gave it all away, and she never did, but you never felt ripped off. Laurel made you believe in the subconscious mind. George was an event. He was tall and obnoxious in that newly queer, newly punk way, over-compensating for his recent history
of academic hippiedom in Iowa where he'd joined a fraternity and had to memorize the text from the Budweiser label. The best was when he pierced his tongue and made a big show about soaking it in salt water, stretching his six-foot-something frame across Iris's linoleum, his protruding tongue dangling into a cup of the stuff. He could've simply rinsed. Every conversation was a vehicle for George to demonstrate his stellar political consciousness, which was fine because everyone's political consciousness was very fresh and important and we loved to dress them up and trot them around the ring. Sometimes Candice's recent ex-girlfriend, Lulu, was there. That was a little embarrassing for me since she was one of the first people I met in San Francisco, when I was just slowly coming out of the coma induced by my banquet of '70s-flavored feminism, and I would argue with her in bars about S/M and pornography.
I like being objectified
, she said daringly in the dark over beer, and she really had me. I mean what do you say to that? “Me Too” would've been nice, but I just wasn't there yet.

In Iris's house we drank a variety of beer. Laurel and George drank Oatmeal Stout because they were vegan and it was the only beer that wasn't prepared by straining the stuff through animal bones or something. Candice drank nice German beer because she had lived in Germany until she was five and was reclaiming her ethnic heritage, and everyone else drank Mickey's or split a 40 of something cheap. And we talked and we smoked a lot. We gave each other tattoos with needles and india ink. That was the night
Iris tried speed for the first time and didn't tell anyone. She was just terribly efficient and smart with the needle. She tattooed the number 13 on her own shoulder, and it looked real good. She tattooed Fag on George's wrist, and the letter S at his temple. Supposedly if you have a tattoo on your face you are legally recognized as unemployable and it's really easy to collect SSI from the government. The S didn't have any kind of meaning, George just liked the letter. Each day after this he would choose a different whimsical S word and say that's what the letter stood for. I tattooed a little triangle on my ankle, surrounded by three little circles. It was the Wyrd Sisters. I got the design out of
The Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects
, which I had stolen from the library. It symbolized general feminine weirdness, witchery, fate, destiny, synchronicity, and it seemed a good way to mark the moment. I put a pool of dark ink into the cap from my Mickey's, and I dunked my needle and began to poke. A drop of beer mixed in with the ink and I thought that was funny. A Mickey's tattoo. Laurel and George were fairly impressive potheads, and dreamy Piscean Iris was recruited into their habit with ease. Though I didn't enjoy pot all that much, I joined in because they were having so much fun. The idea was to smoke until we lost the pipe. The four of us, me and Iris and Laurel and George, were kind of a gang. We were going to get matching flasks and engrave Queer Drunk Punks on it. When the pipe was finally lost in the cracks of the pull-out sofa, me and Iris decided it was time to go out to buy some potato chips.