Valencia (17 page)

And then I puked on New Year's. I had refused to get dressed up because that was dumb and I was deconstructing the whole concept of getting “dressed up” and why I was supposedly more attractive in this certain style of dress. It was about gender and about
class and I was boycotting it. I was at Bobby's cocktail party drinking a can of beer and everyone looked glamorous and great and I was instantly filled with regret, cursing my overly analytical mind. I was a common pauper in the same ratty things I always wore. Bobby, Can I Wear Some Of Your Clothes? Bobby looked smashing in this short, ridiculously feminine thing, sickeningly pink and flouncy and plunging all over the place. I went into his closet. He had everything, shiny plastic things I couldn't understand how to work, tiny rubber outfits dusted with talcum powder, vinyl goddamn stockings. I selected a moderately slutty black dress with bits of netting here and there. I used a little of his eye stuff and lip stuff, I got all glammed out. And wasted so much time primping that everyone was nicely buzzed and I was sober, so I started tossing shots of booze to the back of my throat, trying to catch up. Everyone wanted to be somewhere different at midnight and it was such a big group of us I knew we would ring in the new year trying to find parking. We were on our way to a gay bar, riding in a big, crappy car, big like they don't make cars anymore, stuffed with kids. A clown car. We parked in an alley south of Market and traipsed through rubble to our club. It was a gay club, right, but the owner had died without making any arrangements to hand it over to another homo, so it got passed on to his straight brother, who put all his asshole straight friends in key positions, like bouncer. They were at best condescending and at worst actually dangerous, physically dragging kids out or slamming them into walls. This night some friends of Iris's had been pulled
out and flung in the street for being too young. It had been brutal, becoming one of those drunk, urgent blurred dramas with all these kids clamoring around in their outfits trying to figure out who was inside and who left, where did they go, who saw it happen, should they call the cops, should they sue, girls were crying, and we needed dimes for the pay phone, and what was the proper response to it all.
I'm not going in there
, Iris proclaimed righteously in her slight Georgia twang. My belly floated downward on a torn parachute of hope. I knew she was right, but that's where all our friends were, the ones who hadn't been beaten and thrown in the gutter, and the music thumping through the walls was good stuff, and I was smashed, wanted to dance.
Come on
, Iris said. I cannot argue with righteousness. Iris was a soldier, it's why I loved her. The faith I had in her rested like a vital organ in my body. I mean, once I got over what a sell-out she'd been at the wedding. When the revolution came Iris would lift two rifles into the air, she would throw one to me and together we would run into the streets.

We left the throbbing nightclub and went to Iris's friend's house where the traumatized eighty-sixed girls were. The girl who lived there was super-deluxe political, she'd been on SSI for years because she convinced the State that she was incapable of working with men. She'd traveled through Central America, hitchhiking rides with gun-smuggling Zapatistas. She smoked pot from a pipe, leaning back on her couch, smiling a faint stoned smirk like she knew everything. She dressed schlumpy like Iris did. They passed
the pipe back and forth while I sat chilly and exposed in my tiny slutty dress, feeling like a dumb girl. I kept wondering what Iris's friend thought of me, did she think I was shallow because I was sitting there drunk in a black mesh loincloth, did she think I didn't know how horribly awry the world was, or maybe she thought I didn't care, or that I cared in a vague feed-the-stray-animals way but not in her complex intellectual way. That I was worrying at all about this makes me think I had joined them in smoking pot. But wouldn't that have stopped me from barfing? Because I barfed in the activist girl's house. Where's Your Bathroom? I asked carefully, and it was a long slow walk down the hall because I didn't want to jog and look desperate. The bathroom was messy and dim. I assumed my position around the bowl and let it fly. I was in there forever, wanting to make sure I got rid of it all. I crammed my fingers down my ragged throat and heaved and spit and wiped my lipstick-smeared mouth with toilet paper. I wobbled back down the hall in my heels. I wanted to explain to the political girl that I didn't normally wear heels. Everything carried so much meaning.
Are you all right?
they asked. Umm . . . Yeah, I said hoarsely. I Puked. I figured she'd smell it, so I might as well be honest. The two of them were talking about that girl Iris had a festering crush on. They both worked with her.
She's a poet
, I was informed. That's Great, I said, stretching a big fake smile over my mouth's barfy canyon. I'm Sure Her Poems Are Really Great. I was so sure that this girl was just really incredibly great. I was sure she never drank to the point of
barfing, in fact, she probably didn't drink at all, or smoke, or wear embarrassing, trampy outfits, or shoes she couldn't actually walk in. Surely she wrote stunning poems that were very deep and smartly worded and grammatically correct because she went to college. A good one, a good girls' college, and studied literature—she's very well read. I let my plasticky smile droop into a drunken frown. Iris, Let's Go, I whispered. She didn't really want to, but she did. We were girlfriends.

11

Here's a sad thing that happened about a week after New Year's. Just a little chip off the great vase of sadness. I was in this bar, a dark place with round candles in glass glowing at the tables. I was co-hosting an open mic for girls. Poetry, right, but they did all kinds of things: puppets, lip-syncs, chain saws and one naked girl playing a cello. A girl was doing a dance, I think it was supposed to be tribal, her raver idea of that. The girl was usually on a lot of drugs and trying to get me and Iris to have sex for the porn movies she wanted to make. She did acid and Ecstasy and speed, she had something like nine hairdos going at once—shaved, stripes, a few colors, a tail, all kinds of stuff. Later I nearly had an affair with her. I really tried. She'd cut out using the drugs but had this maternal girlfriend keeping her in line. But this
night she was still the crazy girl who was always high. You'd see her dancing forever at a club, topless and wrapped in a feather boa, the drugs shooting off her skin like a glow. She'd been a stripper in Amsterdam. So at this open mic she danced, naked but smeared with paint like mud, paint in her fucked up hair, crusting the short bits together. She had candles and a big shell that held incense or sage, something smelly to stink up the bar. She had bunches of flowers and that was the best part, thick green stalks, long flowers like a royal scepter, strong flowers like a branch wrenched from a tree. She played some trippy music on a little radio and writhed and twitched and held the flowers, moved them all over her face, dark around her eyes. People paid attention, more than they did to the poetry. Her pubic hair was one more dark spot on her body, and the bitch who ran the bar was going nuts about her being so naked. It kept happening. You have an open mic for girls and they all want to take their clothes off. I thought it was great. I wanted to get in a fight defending it. The naked dancing girl convulsed on the floor on top of all those flowers and I winced because I was planning to take them and I didn't want them crushed. She finished up and took her little radio and the smoking seashell and padded barefoot back to the bathroom to wash off. Her back was stuck with leaves and bits of flower and stuff from the bar floor.

She left the candles burning on the stage, she left the flowers lying beaten on the floor, and I went for them like the kid who'd busted the piñata. I wanted to give one to Iris because things had
been so weird. We were trying to be nonmonogamous so that she could make out with and eventually sleep with that girl I didn't like. I would be very lofty and intellectual and cool about the whole concept and then she would show up looking like something terrible had happened to her neck, and I'd collapse on the sidewalk and weep. I figured I'd give her these flowers. I looked around the bar. It was filled with women. The lady who owned the place was busy pouring beers and couldn't yell at me about the naked girl. I went to the front of the bar to this big round booth, black leather, and Iris was sitting there with that girl, the both of them in the booth's dark curve, the free beer she got off me frothing on the table. They looked at me. Here, I said to my girl, thrusting the lily at her like a sandwich or the ten bucks I owed her. I left pretty quick. Like I handed her my heart and left fast so I didn't have to see what she did with it. I didn't want to know. Her and that girl and their big empty faces. I walked back to the bathroom. This girl I kind of liked was in there. We started shoving each other around, started kissing against the wall. Joey had this big, excellent body, she was really very cute, and I was so happy she felt like kissing me. Ha, I thought with her tongue rolling in my mouth. It was pretty perfect. We pulled away and smiled hot little smiles at each other, flushed, rearranging the spit in our mouths, and then she left the bathroom, and then I did. I saw Iris against the bar, alone with the lily and her beer. Where's Emma? I asked about her floozy. I Just Kissed Joey In The Bathroom.
You did?
Her face got kind of broken-looking. She
was pissed. You Were With Emma! I yelled.
We weren't kissing!
she yelled back. I knew that. It was almost worse. I Came To Give You Flowers, I said, And You Were With Her. Iris was such a shithead. I was so good, picking up the bruised flower with its green blood and rumpled petals to bring to my girl. She broke my heart, so now I have to write about her forever. It made everything different. It's something that can only happen once. You will cry a thousand times but they'll only be echoes. The dancing naked girl came back with all her clothes on. That Was Really Great, I told her. She was very high.
Yeah
, she said, her eyes darting around. Later she told me she did it all for me, the dancing, the candles, some sort of ritual seduction, but it sounded like she was lying. I Thought You Liked My Girlfriend, I said then, and she said
No, you, always you
.

12

I felt like someone stuck some awful inflatable toy under my ribs and pumped it big and puffy until all the lungs and the skinny highways of veins and all the tender nameless organs got crushed up against my stomach. I felt like I was going to faint or puke or cry. All because of Joey, that girl I made out with in the bathroom to make Iris jealous. I'd crushed myself out on her and it was making me sick. She was a big heart walking down the street, not a sweet curvy heart fit for holding nothing but melty lumps of chocolate. I mean she was like the heart she carried under her ribs, a big strong one, thick and heaving. Gory and beautiful in its honesty. That's what I saw as she swung her bicycle through the cafe door, all smiles, puffy jacket, knit hat on her greasy head, black glasses
wrapped around her face like alien eyes. She looked like she was hiding from someone, on the lam. She leaned her bike up against all the other bikes and whipped off her glasses. She hugged me with the fat arms of her powder blue ski jacket, just like the one I had had as a kid. I don't have to tell you I was happy she was there. Iris had taken to sleeping with the awful wench Emma. I'd show up at Iris's house like usual and she'd not even cleaned, the dick left in its harness on the floor, sheets in a tangle, evidence everywhere. But her stereo, that was the worst. PJ Harvey, right there, a sleek vinyl scab on the turntable. She was fucking Emma to PJ Harvey, our music. It was like all the girls were interchangeable. We were the passing bodies of her landscape, we were trains or clouds and the music was Iris's soundtrack for her love affair with herself, the music and the gasps and the giggles. Valentine's Day morning I woke up early in my own bed and made a trip to Rainbow for breakfast stuff, fake sausage and fake Canadian bacon, eggs, Odwalla. I bought her a rose, bagels. Soy milk for coffee. As the 14 Mission bus heaved and jerked along its route I realized I might be surprising Emma as well. I thought about walking into the bedroom and seeing Emma's mousy head of hair poking up from the blankets, her body curled around my girl in sleep. I was glad I'd bought some grapefruits. They'd make such a great thud as they hit the wall, maybe even splatter if I threw them hard enough. The eggs would be a mess, that I was happy with. Food carnage all over that unfaithful girl's walls, knocking over bongs and spilling her putrid pot water onto
the carpet. I was livid, almost disappointed when I found a single solitary Iris, her sweet drowsy face happy to be about to get fed. But I'd gotten so involved in the fantasy I felt like the scene had already happened. Too shaky to cook.
You would've flung the food all over the place?
Iris asked, kind of delighted.
Really?
I Would Have Kicked Her Little Ass, I lied. It's Fucking Valentine's Day. Iris loved the idea of girls fighting over her, it made her melt right back into her futon.
Emma's a black belt in karate though
, she warned me.
She'd probably really hurt you
. Oh, fuck both of you, I thought and scrambled some eggs.