Valencia (26 page)

Stella got sick. Just a cold, but she couldn't ride back to Canada on a motorcycle with a cold. She felt dizzy. She was spread out on my couch picking through old Ursula Le Guin paperbacks from the ancient bookshelves filled by past roommates. My current
roommates brought Stella glasses of orange juice. Make Yourself At Home, I said weakly and left for work. I had managed to get a job raising money for an environmental outfit that was trying to save a bunch of trees up in Mendocino County. These trees were so old and valuable that if you chopped them down you could get like ten thousand dollars apiece for them. There's This Girl At My House, I said to my friend Jay during our fifteen-minute cigarette break outside. Jay was adorable, he looked like a little Kurt Cobain with a pierced dimple, a little silver ball stuck where his smile hit his face.
Who is she?
Jay asked. I Don't Know. I didn't. Stella kept asking for her freedom rings, but I couldn't get in touch with Tommy. Before leaving, Stella handed me her dead dog's collar, the one with the round silver studs she'd worn the night she was Scrumptious.
This was Plum's
, she said.
I want you to have it
. Stella, I said. I had nothing of comparable value to give her, or at least nothing comparable that I wanted to part with. I grabbed a black leather bracelet off my cluttered bureau. It was one half of a pair of wrist restraints, useless now, but I had to give her something. I had just given it to a different girl a few weeks before, and she'd returned it the day before the Dyke March, when I told her I couldn't see her anymore. Here, I said to Stella. Stella left the next day while I was at work talking about nature on the telephone. I came home to a note on the kitchen table, and I was washed with relief. It was the closest thing to alive I'd felt since the march. She had been a living hangover, sitting in my front room, coughing. The night could not end until she
left. Then I slept. I got letters from her, sweet at first—
Show me your soul
. I didn't answer. Then the letters got mean. She wanted her goddamn freedom rings back. And her sunscreen. The rings were hanging from the rearview mirror inside Tommy's battered VW Bug. Stella Wants Her Stuff Back, I said weakly, riding shotgun.
Unh-unh!
Tommy yelled with animation.
These are mine! You can take the sunblock though
.

19

Cecilia was a recovering alcoholic bike messenger with a long mane of tangled, streaked hair and a fabulous sneer. It wasn't a snotty sneer, it was how she smiled. Like she really wanted to smile, but something in her face was holding her back. I thought it was one of the sexiest things I'd ever seen. I almost blew it with Cecilia, right off the bat. The whole alcoholic thing. I was actually trying to bond with her, over sandwiches at the Baghdad, about how I came from a long line of alcoholics. My birth dad had been a raging alcoholic, so bad that he got himself fired from his job at the post office, and many of the men in his family wound up dead from drinking, their livers soaked through, rotted to nothing. My maternal grandfather was a happy and occasional drunk, but neither happy nor occasional
enough to prevent my grandmother, the daughter of a violent drunk, from flinging corned beef and boiled potatoes all over the walls when he bumbled home late for dinner with his sloppy, charming grin and a fumbling whiskey tap dance for the kids. And my stepfather, there were enough bad drunks in his family to fill the local Moose Club, with him being a shining example. But he was recovered now, sober.
Does he go to meetings?
asked Cecilia. She was eating a hamburger. I had decided we were on a date even though my roommate Sam was along for the ride and we were only at the Baghdad, looking out on the throngs of gay folk clotting the Castro. No, He Doesn't Need To Anymore.
What do you mean, he doesn't need to?
Cecilia asked, suddenly tense.
If you're an alcoholic, you're an alcoholic for the rest of your life. You have to keep going to meetings
. Well, He's Still An Alcoholic, I agreed quickly, glad that I at least understood that part. Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. But my stepfather had hated A.A. He'd gone for a little while, but found the way everyone relied on the meetings irritating.
Just trading one addiction for another
, he said, shaking his head. And he didn't believe in god. He hated the whole “powerless over my addiction” mantra.
I got myself into it
, he'd said to me,
and I got myself out of it. Goddamn right I did
. Made sense to me. You did all that work staying away from booze, and then you were supposed to give all the thanks over to some abstract force? But at the Baghdad I sat with my grilled cheese and wondered if maybe my stepfather had pride problems, maybe he should still be at the meetings
with the other alcoholics. Maybe
I
should be in Al-Anon. My little sister loved it. She'd figured herself out and forgiven the jerks of our family everything.
It's a disease
, she'd explained to me earnestly. Alcoholism. I couldn't imagine spending another minute of my life dwelling on all those people, these alcoholic men. Fathers. I didn't want to sit in a circle and talk about them. They could all go and do whatever they wanted, I was through.

I flicked the subject away, talked to Cecilia about her pet rats. They lived in tall cages like rat apartment buildings. The two pink-eyed ones had enormous tumors that dragged from their bodies, they hung like udders or marsupial sacks and were grated raw from the cage's metal floor. Those poor white rats, even if they weren't born in labs, their ancestors were so they were all doomed to tumors. A third rat, brown-eyed and brown-spotted, was a slinky, healthy little rat. Cecilia would let it loose in the folds of her bedding while we lay around on pillows. The rat's quick nose would bump up against my ankle, my ribs, its tail in my hair as it frantically searched for a way off the loft bed and down onto the world below. Cecilia would grab the rat by the middle and hold the twitching head close to her face.
There's nowhere to go, ratty
, she'd say in her rat voice.
There's nowhere to go
.

After the A. A. conversation came another awkward moment when my roommate Sam launched into her favorite fantasy of me having children. Me sending my spawn down to the liquor store at 16th and Valencia, where the big guys working there would package
up a couple 40s and send “Little Tea” back home to her alcoholic mom. Heh Heh, I laughed uncomfortably. Sam was always blowing it for me with the sober girls. Like the time I brought the older, sober writer I worshiped over to our house, and Sam was sitting wasted in the dark, empty bottles at her feet and a half-empty half-pint of Jim Beam in her fist.
I hate girls
, she croaked. I steered the worshiped sober writer down the hall and away from Sam's boozy angst. Cecilia had all these little tests for me. Like, would I leave a beer half-full on the bar when the place closed down? Would I leave it sweating there or would I pick it up and slug it back?
That's a perfectly good beer
, Cecilia encouraged me shiftily.
You're just going to leave it there? What a waste
. I'd leave it. I hated chugging shit, unless it was a drinking game and that was the point. Another time we walked into her house, into her bedroom, and she lifted a heavy dictionary and flipped to the word “alcoholism” and read it out loud.
“The habitual excessive drinking of alcoholic liquor, or a resulting diseased condition.”
Ok, I thought, I get it.

And I guess I was passing the tests, because we were becoming girlfriends. Just spending more and more time together and having weirder and weirder sex. Really theatrical hooker and serial killer sex, with weapons and costumes and psychotic notes left on the windshield of her excellent run-down Chevy Nova. Cecilia was great because she was a bike messenger, which meant she could be anywhere at any minute. I would be walking down a street and she was suddenly there, her feet in those kamikaze shoes that clipped
on to the pedals. An unexpected makeout on the corner of 16th and Mission when I was just on my way to get a bagel. Mornings Cecilia would climb from her bed, down the wooden ladder and into all these stretchy, shiny clothes, her uniform. Little shoes, special gloves on her hands, she was going into a certain battle. All that tangled hair, a sputtering radio clipped to her bag, she was out the door, her bicycle held up in one hand like a body she'd saved from drowning or pulled from a flaming building. She was a hero. Only superheroes wore such shiny outfits and crossed their cities with such speed. After she left, I lazed in her bed, played with the enormous vibrator that lived under her mattress, fed the rats some pellets. They were slowly dying, one of the pink-eyes was already gone, buried in the backyard by a rose bush. Cecilia's rats. They would clamber excitedly to the front of the cage when she came home, squeezing their skinny snouts into a square of mesh, their spastic, sniffing pulses wracking their little bodies.
There's nowhere to go
, Cecilia sang to them gently.
There's nowhere to go, little rat-ties
. Cecilia, I started, What's The Worst Thing You Ever Did? She hardened right up, moved away from me.
I don't want to talk about that
, she said coldly. You can never get into anybody as deep as you really want to. There's nothing to be done about it. Every night Cecilia gave herself up to me, my hands became rats and I whispered into her ears all the terrible things the neighborhood men would do to her, how I would sit in a chair and watch. Every night she pressed knives to my throat, or called me on the phone and invited me over
to cuddle, her snug warmth, her long cloth of hair at my neck, and still I went home and wrote poems about how it wasn't enough. Something gaped in me, stupid and puckered like the maw of a fish, that ugly. In old notebooks I found scrawls of poems about Iris and was shocked to learn that she hadn't been enough either, at least not while she was there. Later the sky was full of her, a pagan force that energized the world around me, everything was Iris. But back when she was just a girl, I'd felt these sad stirrings and worked them into restless verse. I read them, stunned. I'd forgotten I'd written them, forgotten I'd felt that at all. Change the names, they could be about Cecilia. They could be about Willa, or anyone at all. I shut my old notebook, glittered dust-bunnies and whorls of dyed hair clogging its spiral binding. I slid it back under my bed. There's nowhere to go, I thought. Outside my window was the flat grey sky, hard as a rock. The air smelled like sauce from the sausage factory around the corner, the one that kept burning down or getting pelted with red paint bombs by animal rights activists. The factory gave each day a teriyaki flavor. I opened up my window and lit a cigarette. So many flies filled my room, they chased each other in happy circles like real animals, dancing in the air. It brought tears to my eyes. You have PMS, I calmed myself, that's all. It's Ok. There's nowhere to go, I smoked. There's nowhere to go.

20

I haven't been fucked in a while, I thought, belly up on the futon. I didn't much care, either, and that's what concerned me. Cecilia was right there next to me and it's not like she wasn't looking good. Her recently cut hair had settled into a cute, sloppy shag, quelling her desire to chop it entirely off, thank god. We don't need any more girls with bleached crew cuts. We may not even need any more girls with crew cuts, period. Bring back the hair. Cecilia was curled up on me all nice and then she had to get up and get ready to go see her therapist. Outside, the sky was as grey as the scum in my tub, pissing rain and it was so sad to imagine going out in it. All I had eaten that day was half a bagel with a smear of cream cheese, and I was feeling pretty shaky like I do when I don't eat. I figured I'd go to the health food
store around the corner. Something really good, maybe some fake meat. I grabbed a pair of dirty socks out of the empty computer box that worked as my hamper, pulled them up over my legs. Good long socks, wool ski socks, blue with red trim. My girlfriend layered herself up and so did I. We went down my dark stairway to the rainy day. Cecilia had her bike chained up to the parking meter, a little red bike. It was real small because she was. She grabbed me and kissed me good, squishing me with her thick arms. Cecilia was short but she was real muscley. Big bulging arms covered with tattoos. I liked kissing Cecilia, but it made me feel guilty because I'd been thinking for weeks about breaking up with her. We broke up once before but only for about twelve hours and we were together the whole time we were broken up, lying sobbing in her sturdy loft bed, clutching each other in tight, desperate hugs, my orange slip a mess of salty snot. Cecilia talked about the ebb and flow of a relationship, and how we were in the ebb but certainly we would flow again. We spent all day breaking up and then we changed our minds and went to Taco Bell. I was supposed to read that night at this bar and I couldn't, I was so weak and puffy. I could only wander around the big dark room and let everyone buy me drinks, light my cigarettes. So there I was in the ebb again, impatient. I tried not to think about it. I gave myself furtive tarot readings and then disregarded everything they said. Occasionally I would have these outbursts with my close friends, spurting out how I didn't know, I wasn't sure, something was missing, I loved her so much,
it was hard, I needed something else, what, a writer, another artist, someone crazy? Cecilia was kind of crazy—maybe I needed a different, more literary crazy? I would instantly regret these confidences, because I knew I wasn't going to do anything. I wasn't going to break up with Cecilia because she was so nice and I loved her, and now all my friends would look at me and think that I didn't like my girlfriend. I did like her, I liked her a lot. She was a big soft bed to curl into, she was warmth and sadness, green vegetables and really perverted sex.