Valencia (5 page)

We were in Gwynn's Bug the night I told her I liked her. I Have A Crush On You, I said, and bit her arm.
Oh, Michelle
, she said sadly. She was especially depressed that night, driving us aimlessly around San Francisco until inspiration struck and she decided to take me to Pacific Heights to see where Danielle Steel lived. I had been told that Danielle Steel was invented by a bunch of heterosexual men who actually wrote those melodramatic books my mother and aunts loved. But Gwynn insisted she existed.
No, she's real, she lives in this big house right around here somewhere
, she said as we wound around the huge, expensive homes with floodlights and professional landscaping. I wanted to ring Danielle Steele's doorbell and tell her to stop oppressing my mother, but we couldn't find her house and I was starting to feel sick because I had forgotten to eat that day, so we went back to Gwynn's apartment and she fixed me beans with rice that weren't really cooked but I ate it all anyway because I was starving.

So the crush withered and died the way things that aren't being fed usually do. We became friends, good poet-friends, and one day I climbed the paved hills to her home for a visit, hazy and dejected because I had started the cycle of unrequited love
anew, with a different sad poet, Willa, who also lived on Haight Street. Gwynn had a present for me, a t-shirt with a glitter decal of Yoda from
Star Wars. Do you really like it? I had a dream you didn't like it at all
. Yes, I Like It. I Love It. It was a baseball shirt with blue sleeves down to my elbows. I wore shirts like this in junior high, and then in high school worked in a shop at the mall making them, searing names and who-loves-whos onto the backs of t-shirts with this steamy huge machine that melted the white makeup I wore on my face, 'cause I was goth.
I thought it was so you
, she said, pulling up a chair. Gwynn had lawn furniture in her kitchen. I was sitting in this metal chair painted white, it looked like she stole it from an outdoor cafe. The ashtray cat was there, playing with a fake mouse with real animal fur glued to it, batting it under the radiator then smashing her feline skull trying to dig it back out. Gwynn told me about a wedding she'd gone to in Sacramento the previous weekend, and how she had had sex in the shower with the bride. And then the bridesmaids jumped in.
They were all straight, all strippers
, she said.
It was one of those straight parties with a lot of weird sexual energy. Ever been to one of those?
I Can't Believe You Had Sex With The Bride!
It wasn't really sex, we were just groping
. And then the phone rang as we talked and it was the bride and she wanted Gwynn to take her to the beach. Oh, I wanted one of Gwynn's cigarettes so badly and she wouldn't give one to me. Winston's are what my dead grandmother smoked. I loved her so much, Aquarian like me, big round
glasses she wore even while swimming, a gauzy kerchief tied under her chin to keep the chlorine off her hair. She took us south from Boston every summer, a long, hot ride to Disney World via the swampy trailer parks our Louisiana relatives lived in. My jovial grandfather, tearing over state lines, and Nana, who didn't know how to drive, clutching the dash like she was trapped on a carnival ride. Me and my little sister fighting sweaty in the back seat until our grandmother snaked her talon-tipped fingers our way, pinching up a bit of little girl leg skin to shut us up. She'd buy cartons of Winston's for cheap at Carolina gas stations and I'd steal a pack to smoke in the bathroom at Stuckey's.

Come On Gwynn, Just One.
No
, she said with that big sad face.
You said you weren't gonna smoke
. It was true. I wasn't going to smoke or drink or eat dairy or have sex, and I wasn't going to go visit Willa, who was only a block or two up the street. Willa, who did not love me. I asked Gwynn if it was bad to keep with a relationship that had you in love with someone who didn't love you back and she said yes. She was trying to be supportive, holding out on me with the cigarettes and telling me I shouldn't walk up the street to see the girl. Everything inside me felt chemical. Nicotine blood pushing me at the cigarettes. Phenylethylamine pushing me out of Gwynn's house to Willa, phenylethylamine being the neurotransmitter your body produces when you're in love, making you chase down the object of your desire because the mere sight of her activates the chemical and gets you high.
That's what Willa told me. She was so brainy, it's why I loved her. She also told me I didn't trigger her phenylethylamine. And there I was in withdrawal, thinking, she's just up the street, I'd only stay a minute. That's why I took Gwynn's bike that day, so I could change my life and stay away from Willa. Gwynn didn't want it anymore, her lungs couldn't pull it up the hills to her home. It was a black one-speed, a zillion years old with foot brakes and a big grated basket. Ok, I'll Take It. I thought it would help me get healthy since I'd pledged not to smoke or drink or do much of anything anymore. And I could ride with Dykes on Bicycles in the parade. And I couldn't go see Willa, 'cause there was no way in hell I could pump that relic up the hill to her house. I dragged it out of Gwynn's apartment and coasted home. It was fun being on a bicycle in San Francisco, cutting across Market Street to my home in the Mission. I took it by this bookstore to visit my friend Tatiana at work. She loved my new bike. She pedaled it up and down the street wishing she owned it. I was so sad that day. My heart was trying to climb from my body. Tatiana was sad too. She was with a woman who'd been straight her whole life and just couldn't fall in love with a girl. Are You In Love With Her?
Yeah
. That Sucks.
Let's make up rumors about each other and spread them all over town
. I made up a great one about her answering a suspicious help-wanted ad and it turning out to be an assistant-in-training position with a dyke bounty hunter. You know, a gun for hire. A killer. Everyone believed it because Tatiana's kind of psycho
and would maybe take a job like that. She told people that I was flying to Los Angeles to lead a feminist action protesting
The Love Connection
. That's So Stupid, I told her when I saw her again.

Oh, and then the bike got stolen. I rode it to work once and it made me feel like I'd swallowed fire. I'd been keeping it in the back hall because it was too heavy to be lifted up the stairs like some lightweight mountain bike. Then the alcoholic guy downstairs who lined his windows with empty vodka bottles fell down during a bad drunk and got shipped to the hospital. When he came home, he had a scab on his forehead and a wheelchair that could only be wheeled out the back hall so the bike had to go. It wasn't important to me, the bike, and it did not keep me away from Willa. So I didn't feel I owed it anything, and I wasn't about to buy a bike lock. I pedaled it over to my friend George's house on Sycamore and left it parked on his stairs behind the tall locked gate. George was one of the first kids I ever met in San Francisco, at a protest in front of a Baptist church where that reverend who made
The Gay Agenda
video and said gay people eat poop was cowering inside. Outside, me and George and bunches of other queers blocked traffic, got shoved around by unsympathetic dyke cops, pounded on the church doors and screamed
Nazi!
Someone wrenched the dreaded american flag from the flagpole and ran a happy homo rainbow flag up instead. George and I were both exhausted by activism, it
was the last action we'd go to for a long while and probably the last time we submitted to chanting, ever. We had lost our idealism, but gained a friendship. Willa said I wanted the bike to get stolen or else why would I leave it on Sycamore, where George's own bike was stolen by the Stolen Bike Ring that lurked on the corner. She said it was like how I call in sick a lot when I want a job to fire me. That wasn't true. I didn't want the bike stolen. I just didn't care if it was. I only cared later when I was tripping on mushrooms and this girl Iris said,
You know, I really loved that bike, I knew it was going to get stolen and I just loved it. I thought about stealing it myself but then I thought that would be weird
. Oh Iris, you should have. Now it's gone forever. If any of you ever see me treating something badly, carelessly, you can take it. Honest, it's yours.

3

I was trying to get fired from my job at the courier company. I was doing it for Willa. It was incredible, the effort it took. My entire history of employment, starting back at the fluorescent-lit supermarket where I swished, Catholic-school-skirted, through the sawdusted aisles to collect my drawer and insert it into my register with the proud purpose of one who has never worked before, has always seemed full of horribly precarious arrangements. In my heart I knew I wasn't cut out for it, employment. I was irresponsible, had no work ethic, was raised by parents who called in sick regular as weekends, and it was only a matter of time until I made The Big Fuck-Up and got canned. But this job would just not fire me. The courier company used cars, not bikes. I sat at a computer and took orders from different financial
district companies, occasionally deleting calls from companies I disagreed with politically. I was flat on my futon with the girl I loved with a fierce and holy love, I had the phone at my ear and in my weakest tone possible was explaining to my boss why I couldn't come in. I was really sick.
Michelle, you have got to come in
. I had just done this last week, probably the week before.
Your job is seriously in jeopardy if you don't show up
. Well . . . Ok, I said, hurt. What if I really had been sick? They didn't know. I'm On My Way, I said, and rolled back over to curl around Willa. She was this thing, this marvelous thing too good for this world that had tortured and tormented her, locked her up in stale institutions and driven her to slice up her skin, run barefoot through New England snow 'til her feet were dead slabs of meat from the freezer. She was my job. I didn't have time for two.
Are you going to work?
she asked, and I pressed my cheek to her scalp's clammy stubble. Her neon mohawk curled up from her crown like something from a Dr. Seuss book. No, I was not going to work. I was an artist, a lover, a lover of women, of the oppressed and downtrodden, a warrior really. I should have been somewhere leading an armed revolution in the name of love and no, I was not going to work. Willa didn't work. I mean, she did, but it's a stretch to call it work. She bartended at a dyke bar a few nights a week, drank free beer, and bummed all her cigarettes. People paid three bucks at the door to have the same experience she was having at her job. All week she was free, writing angsty brilliant poems, drawing comic books, painting gigantic
painful pictures, you know,
living
. I wanted to live. With my tortured tormented girlfriend who, incidentally, still forbade me to refer to her as my “girlfriend” and was pretty sure that she would never fall in love with me, although she did think she would fall in love again, sometime in the future. I had ceased to care. My love for her was religious, it was patriotic; like god or country it was something I pledged myself to in service of something huge and perfect that I was honored to have anything to do with. Our sex was adolescent, shy and blanketed, done through layers of flannel pajamas that rarely came off. In a very Catholic way I felt this made it more special, reaching out to the pile of cloth that was her body and pushing deeper, finding the sharp jutting bone of her hip or the softer ball of her breast. She was a message, a coded message to be deciphered with careful intelligence. With time I would understand all of her and she would love me passionately, but that would never happen so long as I had to pull myself away from her every 8:00 a.m., leaving her fully clothed and sleeping, to wake into the day without me.