Valencia (7 page)

That night I took my roommates out for margaritas. I Made All This Money, I said guiltily. They gasped when I said how much.
Are you ok?
Yeah, I'm Fine, I shrugged. Was I shallow? How come I was ok? Willa came to my bed like she did every single night, still insisting she was not in love with me, and I believe that she was not. Why was she there? What was going on inside her, inside everyone, the invisible motors that kept us chugging toward all the things we didn't want? When she started to touch me, she curled up into an autistic ball of flannel, face smashed into the pillow. What?
I don't want to touch you like they do
. Oh Willa, You Couldn't, I said, pulling her back to me. You're Nothing Like That, It's Not At All The Same. Everything was slightly off, like a tab of acid melting slowly into my bloodstream. The same but different. I went somewhere she would never go and brought a loneliness back and I had to climb over it to reach her. The fact that we had never had safe sex worried Willa now and she made sure to wear gloves, which I thought was smart
but I suddenly felt contaminated, and upset that I brought her all this worry. So I wrote a poem about it and read it at an open mic and she got mad at me because now everyone would know she'd had unsafe sex and would think she was dumb or diseased. And the woman who ran the open mic realized from the poem that I was whoring and she freaked out and told me all the horrible things that would happen to me, and if I came and worked for her at her small press I could get experience and be able to find a real job, though of course she couldn't pay me. And my period was late. Every day my panties were clean, spotless, and Willa would ask again and again,
Did you get your period yet god it's really late did your period come yet?
She didn't say anything else and she didn't need to. I went to the local lesbian Walgreens and bought a pregnancy test, completely paranoid that one of the eight hundred dykes who lived on the block would bump into me as I handed over my cash. I went home and pissed on the little strip. I had absolutely had safe sex with these men, although not as safe as Angie, who, in addition to condoms, stuffed one of those horrible, frothing contraceptive sponges up there, but I was safe. And I wasn't pregnant. This is fucking crazy, I thought as I triple-bagged the evidence and threw it in the trash. My period came and Willa was calmed.

One day Linda booked me a call with Novato Bob. All the tricks gave regular names, then some word to distinguish them from the roster
of Bobs, Johns and Mikes. Linda gave me some vague disclaimer beforehand, like he was intense but harmless and she had seen him and all the girls had seen him. Novato Bob pinned me to the bed and held my head to the mattress. Don't Do That, I snapped, and he snapped back,
Come on
, annoyed, and it makes sense that I don't remember much of the call except that he was rough in a way that scared me. And I knew he wouldn't hit me, just fuck me, and did it matter that he hated me while he did it? It's not rape if I knew I was going to end up fucked when I walked in the room. And I did not stop the call, I took it because that essentially was my job, to take it, lie still until it was done, take my money and leave. I was waiting on the corner the next week for my boss to pick me up and I felt my throat go thick like I'd swallowed something big that stuck there and I knew I couldn't go. I went home. It was early still so I climbed back in bed, alone, without Willa. I quit my job. I quit Willa too, eventually I did, because she was not in love with me and I was an artist, a lover, a lover of women, a warrior really, too noble to stick it out in a dead-end job 'til they saw fit to fire me.

4

Pride Weekend was the perfect weekend to leave a lover and hop right into a new one. The city was buzzing, and I was gliding up 18th Street with a brand new girl and a 40, while the June sun was still high and shining. Passing the bottle back and forth, snug in its wrinkled brown paper. I just love to be drunk in the daylight. Everything turns liquid and golden with me moving right through it. The air's bright shimmer washed away the dead feeling I'd had since that last night with Willa, when she'd slammed her head against my plaster walls again and again, the awful dull thud of it louder than my own shrill voice sounding out the terms of our breakup. I hated the sight of her small body lurching toward the wall, it made me furious. Willa, Stop. My room was like a tight dark box, there was hardly room for air with all the
terrible motion and mania, a crazy whirling like bad weather moving in fast. I didn't understand. Willa loved me, but it was a friendly love we could keep between us while we both went off in search of wild crazy love. It was best for both of us—didn't Willa want to fall in love? Each bash of her body up against the wall made me think of her scars, her diaries, all the things that made me think of her as too precious and fragile, the thing that sewed me to her, and here it was unfurling its awful pages into my bedroom and it made me want to kill her. Willa, Stop. It was so unnecessary. Not romantic. I was crying. Her boomerang face was too much a dark blur to see if she was too, but her voice was a warble. I Can't Take This, I said and walked into the hall. It was so late, how could my roommates be sleeping through this?
Fuck you!
Willa cried, and that was it. Get Out! I screamed. I heard motion from behind Laurel's door. Willa ran down the stairs. In her pajamas.
Fuck you!
she yelled again, crying. The door slammed and rattled. My room was still. Something should have been broken, there should be shards on the carpet or plaster dusting off the walls, but everything was fine. Like nothing had happened. Laurel's door creaked open.
Michelle?
I went into her room and smoked with her in the dark, our bodies folded out the window, leaning over the empty street. She Was Slamming Her Head Into The Wall, I said. Laurel smoked. I didn't know how I could go back into my room and sleep on that futon, everything vibrating with Willa. Her energy had reached an intensity capable of imprinting itself forever on the place, a ghost, Willa forever hurtling
toward my wall. But the next day, it was gone. My room. Bits of everywhere I'd been so far sitting on the shelves, shriveled cactus bits from Tucson, a tiny sparkling geode from the Grand Canyon, broken bits of china from ships crashed off the coast of Provincetown and washed into the harbor. All I could see of Willa was the gigantic bag of thrift store socks she'd bought me, horrified at my tiny collection of five. A bright and jumbled pile, like Willa with her Crayola mohawk and mismatched clothes. I couldn't think about her. I thought about the new girl. Her name was Iris.

Iris was the quiet girl on the bike outside the club everyone went to. I knew her roommates, sort of. I first met her a few weeks before ending it with Willa, on Harrison Avenue at three o'clock in the morning, with a neon sign blinking above our heads and people roaring out of the nearby alley on motorcycles. A little farther down the street was the steady hum of trucks and buses filling up at the diesel station on the corner. Iris was on her bicycle, the big wheels lifting her off the ground. She had her helmet on and she looked about eleven years old. Some kind of striped shirt, orangey stripes, and jeans. Then I saw her again the very next night, at a party Willa had brought me to. There she was again. I was on the back porch where Willa's last girlfriend, a notorious drunk named Kitty, was smashing teacups on the wooden floor. I thought she was great. Iris's roommates, who I was sitting with at a little table, thought she was obnoxious. Candice was like the head roommate, kind of cold I thought, critical and detached, with different-colored
eyes, like David Bowie. She had lived in Georgia with Iris, and the two of them were gossiping about people I would never know, the women's studies professor they had had a crush on, girls who were dumb or girls who were cool. They made no effort to include me, yet I couldn't bring myself to leave the table. I just knew that if I could find the right entry into the conversation I could say something brilliant and captivate Iris. Can I Have A Cigarette? I asked Candice, and she nodded coolly and passed me her pack. Another teacup sailed above our heads as Kitty howled and stomped down the backstairs and into the party.
Who is that?
Candice asked, and kind of glared at me like I was responsible. Iris smiled, a little smile. She was pretty. Her face looked young. I ran into her later in the evening when I was raiding the hostess's refrigerator. I had found a jar of pickles, and nothing is better when you're really drunk and kind of dehydrated than a pickle. I think I was even shamefully stealing sips of the salty green juice. It seems like such a gross thing to enjoy, like beef jerky. There was Iris. Want A Pickle? I asked. Maybe she took one. I remember I kissed her hand. My seduction technique is best filed under Obvious. I told her to meet me the next day at the Bearded Lady for waffles and neither of us showed up. But she turned up a week later, part of the late-night gaggle of kids I was smuggling into the anarchist labor union that had forgotten to take away my keys before firing me so many months ago, for running away to Tucson and leaving the office unmanned. With a lack of Willa freeing up my time, I spent my evenings sneaking
into the closed-up office building, which was above a strip club on Market, to use the xerox machine and the computers. First all by myself, chain-smoking and gazing out the windows at the esoteric glowing eyeballs and clouds on the Oddfellows Temple across the street, at the drunken brawls outside the check-cashing place on the corner, following with my eyes the saunters of ponytailed girls on their way to work at the peepshow downstairs. Later I got lonely and started throwing zine parties. The kids I invited would stand on the street six stories down, the lively corner of 7th and Market, and they would scream
Revolution!
and I would take the elevator downstairs and let them scurry in. It was really fun. After getting completely wired on coffee I would start in on wine, Rene Junot, six bucks for a wide bottle, or some squat green grenades of Mickey's, or whiskey, or whatever people brought, and everyone who came would have to write something and it would get printed out on the computer and I would stick it all together with a gummy yellow glue stick and crank it out on the xerox machine.

The final time we did this Iris was there. She made me so nervous, as she sat at a glowing computer and hardly talked. I am always compelled to fling myself at these quiet girls whose quietness only makes me talk larger, talk faster and faster to fill up the nervous silence they seem to sit inside so comfortably. I would babble to Iris until I felt a warm flush rise and I felt like a jerk and settled back into my computer. Then Iris would say something simple and I would launch into another grand show and finally some more kids shouted
Revolution!
out on the street and I was saved. I think that Iris presented herself to me as some kind of writer, or maybe I just made her into one, the way I had assumed for the first half of my life that my mother was a writer, simply because I loved her and identified with her and figured since I was a writer she would have to be one too. Iris did write a little. She wrote good. Her contribution to that night's zine was a rant about how she hated her grandfather. She was inspired by the solemn portrait of the union's grand martyr, Joe Hill, that hung above her computer, and she wrote about how her bourgeois grandfather probably hated Joe Hill and was glad that he'd been killed by The Man during the general strike long ago. I was impressed that Iris knew who Joe Hill was. I hadn't. The only reason I got hired by the union, which kept only two paid employees, was that a dyke in the union who knew me from my Queer Nation/clinic defense/queer street patrol/AIDS outreach days in Boston had snuck me into the computer system as a five-year East Coast union organizer, and told all the old guys who ran the outfit a big fat lie about how I had successfully organized exotic dancers in Boston. I didn't feel so bad about taking the job since I did want to be an anarchist labor union organizer and had big dreams of returning capitalism to the workers. But the union turned out to be nothing but a historical society of irritating gray-haired bureaucrats dedicated to preserving Joe Hill's ashes, and little more. The ashes sat in a film canister inside a gold paper bag, locked up in a glass case. See That? I asked Iris. That's Joe Hill. His Ashes Are In There. Once when I was really mad
at the union for not letting me involve us with Food Not Bombs, I concocted a great plan of revenge. I would steal Joe Hill and take him on a road trip, free his restless, noble spirit from the gilded cage they had locked him in. I would take photos of him in front of famous statues and landmarks across the country and publish them in a zine about the sad state of anarchist labor unions today. I would steal the union's membership roster and do a daily raffle in which some lucky worker won a pinch of Joe. I loved imagining the gritty bone and ash between my fingers as I dropped a pile of the man into an envelope and set him free. The best idea I never acted on.