Valencia (4 page)

That was the morning Julisa was taking me to a rodeo protest. There were all these kids at her house, kids from PETA, Earth First!,
Voices for Animals. I used to protest the rodeos when I lived in Tucson. We stood with our signs and were abused by the cowboys. At one point Julisa lay down on her back and had us hog-tie her.
I want to know what it feels like
, she explained to the crowd. Her skirt came up around her waist, showing her white cotton underwear. The cowboys didn't know what to make of it. It was performance art. Actually, it made me think of sex. Petra had ruined me. That night I went out for drinks with my other Tucson friend, Laura. Like Julisa, Laura was theoretically bisexual. She always had a boyfriend, but her friends were all dykes. We drank beer at this bar that had a big candy dish full of free cigarettes. Free buffet, too. The living is easy in Tucson, if you can find a job. These kids were all students. Laura's new boyfriend was from Israel and was leading a toast in honor of a Jewish holiday. What's The Holiday?
Well, these people were going to kill us but we killed them instead
. That's Excellent, I said, and toasted. A girl sitting next to me kept hitting on me harder and harder the more she drank. She was a medical student at the university. She gave me cigarettes, eventually she was giving me hickeys, chewing on my neck right there at the table. I still had the hazy ghost of a hickey from Petra, and I figured if I could keep getting it touched up by other girls it'd be like it never went away.
I have beer in my car
, said the girl, so I went. I don't remember her name, it started with a vowel. Let's call her “Edie.” Edie had a six of Newcastle in her back seat but no way to open them. I ended up breaking the neck of one on the curb. We strained it for glass with our teeth as we drank.
Come in the car
, Edie urged. I Have To Meet Someone In An Hour, I said. The boy from the tattoo shop, who was going to take me to the dyke party.
Don't worry, I'll drive you
, she said.
Come on, come in
. It was a Camaro. I figured I should do it. For artistic reasons. I climbed into the car and Edie climbed on top of me and we made out. She had a Luther Vandross tape playing and she was singing it to me and it was really gross. What did she want me to do? Stare longingly at her? Somehow Edie found a way to kneel on the floor of the front seat and she got my pants down and put her face in my cunt. I kept thinking about how I was in a Camaro. I was doing it for Petra. She would really appreciate it. She did recently tell a crowd of people
Michelle had sex in a Camaro once
, and for a second I had no idea what she was talking about. Then I remembered. Edie. Edie, I Have To Go. I was wearing this necklace made of small fragrant beads of myrrh, and in our fumbling it snapped and fell between the car seats.
Oh
, Edie moaned.
I'm going to find that some day and it's going to make me really sad
. Jesus. She was worse than me. Edie drove me to the tattoo shop and walked me inside. I'm sure she was hoping I'd bring her to the party but I did not want her hanging on me all night.
I'm just another one of your conquests, huh?
she demanded as we approached the shop.
I'm just another notch on your belt
. She was pretty drunk. The piercing boy closed up the shop and I said my goodbyes to sulking Edie. I never saw her again. Since the piercing boy was only seventeen years old I was elected to buy liquor for him and his friend. They wanted Zima. Really? You Guys Drink
Zima? They insisted it was good. We were late getting to the party, which was a birthday bash for this girl, Daisy, who had phenomenal hips. I've never seen anything like it. She was very sexy. A few girls were in tuxedos, and Piercing Boy abandoned me pretty quickly for some other boy. I recognized a couple of girls from when I had lived in Tucson and started a Queer Nation, but they were involved in their own romantic intrigues, rushing in and out of rooms, huddling and confiding. No one was very interested in me. There was a lot of liquor and food, so I sat at the table and drank vodka and picked at the remnants of a chocolate coconut cake that was divine. I wrote a poem about Petra and her stupid girlfriend, and this lumberjacky girl in a baseball hat came over to see what I was writing. I told her all about Petra and her dumb girlfriend. I Guess I Shouldn't Be So Mean About Her Girlfriend, I confessed.
It's ok
, she said authoritatively.
It probably keeps you from turning your anger and criticism inward
. She was a therapist. I hated her. I thought we would never leave the party. Dykes are really sceney everywhere, not just in San Francisco. Anybody who doesn't think so is just part of the scene. I went home to Julisa's. She had a futon in every room in the house. I grabbed the one on the porch and slept outside in the warm cactus air.

I made a friend on the Greyhound back to San Francisco. Tony from Texas. I didn't ask for him, he chose me. He had long, permed hair and had been playing keyboard in a metal band before hopping the
Greyhound. His girlfriend had just broken up with him, so he went to the McDonald's where she worked, intending to kill himself in the men's room, but then decided to go to California instead. He had twenty bucks and a bag of psycho-pharmaceuticals. He called them his happy pills. They were in a little brown paper bag, and he'd shake the bag and say,
Let me know if you get stressed. I got happy pills
. Every time the bus driver took a break Tony would hand me a cigarette. I didn't even have to ask. Carltons. At one stop the driver announced there was a snack truck in case we were hungry. Oh Great, I said sarcastically, Skittles. Tony went and bought me two bags of Skittles. Tony, You Don't Have Any Money!
Take the Skittles, Michelle
. He was my boyfriend. I thought about all the Edies and Tonys. I didn't want to be anybody's Petra. Or was I an Edie? I was tired. Tony had this great shirt, Bikers For Jesus. It had a big motorcycle and it said Pray to the Best or Die Like the Rest. I could have gotten him to give it to me. I thought about trading him my ACT UP shirt, since he was in San Francisco now. At the Greyhound terminal I put Tony on a bus to Haight Street and waved goodbye.

I saw Petra at The Stud, rolling her fists and shaking her clanging wallet chain to that Nine Inch Nails cover of that Rod Stewart song. Could she be wearing spurs on her boots? Was she that cool? I heaved a sigh. One of burden, not romance. Hey, Petra. I showed her my new tattoo. I Was In Tucson, I explained.
Cool
, she said.
Maybe she hadn't noticed I was gone. Her girlfriend was back from her vacation down under. She was running around the bar with the slave owner from the sauna. They both had these Pebbles Flintstone ponytails on top of their heads.
I'm Tabitha
, she said, accosting me at the bar.
I just thought we should know each other
. She had this big, plasticky smile. Or maybe it was genuine. Yeah, I said, and shook her extended hand. She lingered awkwardly for a minute, and left. She looked a little disappointed.

2

Maybe I should tell you some more about Gwynn, sad sad Gwynn, the tortured poet who did not come to Arizona with me. Gwynn was an alcoholic, or had been once, I wasn't sure how the whole alcoholism, Twelve Step situation worked. Couldn't you simply have alcoholic periods, when you are sad or reckless and drinking for pathetic reasons, and then you get past it and cheer up and can drink again because it's so much fun to be drunk? Sobriety seemed a real stick-in-the-mud stance to take, but I guess drinking was a problem for Gwynn. It pushed her onto airplanes to follow different sad women from state to state. She had been to a few A.A. meetings in the Tenderloin, which just depressed her and increased her desire to drink, so she stopped showing up. Gwynn, she was always talking about
wanting to be drunk and honestly I did want to encourage that, I wanted to go to a bar with her and let all the stuff sobriety pushed down be released so I could catch it in my palms and finally kiss her. She was just so sad. Melancholy was a fleshy wave permanently cresting on her face, she had to speak through it when she talked. I found her beautiful, but it only made her sadder to hear it. Gwynn liked women who were on the edge and dangerous or else really sad like herself, giving me an inferiority complex. I'd never been a drug addict or anorexic or even an alcoholic, never compulsively cut up my arms or puked secret after-dinner pukes. I'd been a prostitute for a little while, but that hadn't been self-destructive enough to count. A row of scars laddered down Gwynn's shoulder. She'd put them there herself. She'd trail her fingers up the scars making harp noises, and laugh. I wanted to take care of this woman. Get her to stop eating so much meat. Gwynn was very unhealthy. She smoked cigarettes in her apartment with all the windows shut until her cat stank like an ashtray.

Living right upstairs from my sad poet Gwynn was Justine, the older woman who had mangled Gwynn's heart off and on for the past four years. I'm sure it was mutual, but only Gwynn got my sympathy. I didn't know a lot about Justine, just that we shared the same birthday, a good omen, and that she sang in the choir of a progressive church, which I thought was inexcusably weird. It took me a while to realize how epic their affair had been. Gwynn didn't talk about it much. The stories she told were always about the
others, the drinkers she stalked at parties and begged to run away with her, to head for Nevada in her black and shiny VW Bug that really did look like a bug. Being a poet, Gwynn told beautiful stories about these unstable women. I would sit and listen and regret being so normal and well-adjusted, unable to be the challenge she seemed to need to keep her love life exciting. It was a doomed crush with some nice moments. We went to the movies once, we saw
The Piano
and hated it, cringed through the whole exquisitely shot thing mumbling
no oh no oh please don't make her fall in love with the rapist
. We drove out of San Francisco to the Serramonte Mall on the freeway because she was craving an Orange Julius. I got one too, but it was a big letdown. I didn't remember them as tasting so much like Creamsicles and I really hated Creamsicles. Gwynn ate an Orange Julius hot dog loaded up with so much garbage, I wondered if it was even vegetarian to kiss her. That trip to the mall was the first time I ever saw a Hot Dog on a Stick stand at the food court, and I gazed in horror at the high school girls who worked there, the towering striped hats that were their uniform. There was something really obscene about them jumping up and down on the old-fashioned lemonade press. Gwynn told me about how she tried to get a job at Hot Dog on a Stick when she was a teenager in southern California, but they wouldn't hire her because she wasn't slutty enough. We went to the surreal candy store where tubes of sickeningly bright candies cascaded down the walls and I bought a little bag of really toxic gum, blue gum and green gum, incredibly
sour. It raised your taste buds and made you wonder if your tongue was bleeding. We would chew a piece six or seven times then spit it out the car window and try a new one.