Valencia (18 page)

It looked like it was about time for me to get interested in a girl who wasn't Iris, and Joey was plenty interesting. Inside the coffeehouse she took up space like a heart inside a body, like the room was a throne for her humble importance. She held a smudgy newspaper in her hands, eyes on the astrology column.
I've got to confer with you about my horoscope
, she told me, making my own heart bounce because I knew she had a real romantic horoscope that week. That's when I know I like a girl for certain, when I search her zodiacal blurb for a hint of myself inside her destiny. I hated her saying that, making me get all melty, and encouraging the hopeful
boing
of my heart. Joey needed a tarot reading and that's all she needed, but the ping-pong ball inside me kept on rattling. She held the cards in her hands, flipped them around sloppily, a dog with silver-ringed paws. She shuffled the deck like playing poker and asked if that was ok. She kissed the deck and slapped it down
on the metal table. I laid the cards out, thinking, she should get someone different, someone who wouldn't be looking for clues in every card. Oh, the girl was sad. I flipped them over, she had those merciless swords, sharp points tearing apart a flower. She had the murkiest water cards, she had the scarab that stole the sun and hid it beneath the ocean, and I knew if she just let me in a little more I could make the good cards come.

Outside, we smoked cigarettes in a garden full of girls. Joey was turning her petals toward all their different lights. Me wishing that I knew what her dream girl was so I could become it. Yeah, I knew that was a dumb thing to think, I could tell by the way it felt in the sad space of my stomach. All lousy, as I looked at my linty wool tights, re-evaluating my smudgy red eye shadow. She liked girls who looked like superheroes, the kind of girl superhero who required you to suspend disbelief in order to imagine her kicking ass. Like the ultra-skinny girl over there with the biggest eyes and perfect hair the color of roses. All these girls were the fanciest, as I sat on a small red table and swung my legs like a child, looking nervous. There was another girl and I guess she could've passed for Wonder Woman, her eyes were lidded with sharp blue, she had glittery barrettes in her jet-black hair and Joey's head on her lap. I thought she should appreciate it more, touch her greasy swirls or something, not just sit there like she was waiting for the cameras to go on. Wonder Woman had Dr Pepper lip gloss that she let me borrow even though I told her that I hated Dr Pepper. It made me think
of driving cross-country with my grandfather when I was a kid. I told them about how we'd pull into a hotel when the sun went down and he'd climb into bed with a bottle of whiskey and a single red can of Dr Pepper, smoke filterless L&Ms in the unventilated room, and stay up all night watching TV movies while I ducked my head under the covers, hiding from the glare and the thin haze of smoke that glowed like the LA sky at dusk.

God, I want to barf just thinking about it
, said Joey the talking dog from her place on the superhero's lap. So I kept talking because nothing gets me going like knowing I should shut up. Oh, I should be quiet and full of potential like all those still flowers, but I know I am a weed and I've got to blow my seeds around the garden. I have such faith in words, like the right combination spilling from my mouth could've made her look at me like she looked at all of them, eyes blue and bright as a kid's. So I babbled about pot cookies and mystical experiences, the time I got so high I thought I was buddha and Jesus and had an orgasm right there on my bed just thinking about it, both hands tucked under the pillow. I knew I sounded like a lunatic and the dog grinned lazily. And when the superhero finally left the cafe, I learned that she was the straight girl Joey had told me about kissing the other night.

In the corner store we pulled fat bottles of water from the shelves. No one thinks it's weird that we have to buy clean water, and that's how I know we're going to hell. Joey needed candy. We hovered over the racks, she grabbed Starbursts and bunches of
chocolate and I ladled a handful of artificial fruit stuff, lollipops and colored gumballs, hard blocks of Jolly Ranchers sticky under cellophane. The stoic counter guy rang up our purchases. Outside, winter made like it was leaving, and I felt it all inside me as I took off my fluffy jacket and my tight, filthy thermal. We walked the warming February streets, this phony spring making me different, making me want to fly right out of this city and land someplace new. Do You Look At Yourself In Every Window You Pass? I laughed as she nodded. I Do Too. She sang Carly Simon. We were in a band together right then, and she was the singer. She sang like . . . I would sit inside my chest thinking it couldn't get any worse, my heart, and then I'd hear her sing and I'd beat my drums like I was driving away every feeling I'd ever had, slamming at her and the garden girls, Iris and her new Emma.
Bam bam bam
.

We entered the cool cave of the practice space with all the long-haired, goateed boys stoned on clouds of pot and playing with power tools. I tossed my fluffy coat into the hollow of my bass drum and lay on the carpet with my worn newspaper. A shirtless boy came in and told us he had to cut the power for a minute, and I thought about being alone in the cool black room with Joey.
Let's go smoke
, she said, and I grabbed the cigarettes off the amp. She started talking to me about Wonder Woman.
I feel like something big is happening, but I don't know what to do about it
. With The Straight Girl? I asked in the blankest voice possible.
With everything
. Back in the sun we walked to the edge of the parking lot where
a black Impala convertible sat, rusted and rotting, looking like it just got dredged from a swamp. Rainwater pooling on the floor. We climbed up onto it and sat our butts backward on the edge of the windshield, feet stretched into the front seat. Before she even joined the band, I would think of her each time I passed the car, the little round medallions with the red and black racing flags affixed to the dash. On the rusting Chevy, Joey told me about her date the other night with a girl she used to like who she maybe liked again. How her heart was shut off and it felt pretty good. How she just wanted to play around and this girl and that girl and this girl and I smoked my cigarette and went Uh-Huh. The sun made me feel like a restless country girl even though I'd never been on a farm. I knew what I stood for, even if nobody else did. I knew the piece of me on the inside, truer than all the rest, that never comes out. Doesn't everyone have one? Some kind of grand inner princess waiting to toss her hair down, forever waiting at the tower window. Some jungle animal so noble and fierce you had to crawl on your belly through dangerous grasses to get a glimpse. I gave Joey my cigarette so I could unlace the ratty green laces of my boots, pull them off, tug the linty wool tights off my legs. I stretched them pale over the car, the hair springing like weeds and my big toenail looking cracked and ugly. I knew exactly who I was when the sun came back and the air turned warm. Joey climbed over to the hood of the car, dusty black, and said
Let's lie down, I love lying in the sun
, but there wasn't any sun there. We moved across the street onto the
shining white sidewalk and she stretched out, eyes closed. I smoked my cigarette, tossed it into the gutter and lay down beside her. She said she was sick of all the people who thought she felt too much, who wanted her to be calm and contained. Who? I asked. All the flowers, the superheroes. I thought about how she had kissed me the other night, quick and hard, before taking off on a date in her leather chaps, hankies flying, and I sat on the couch and cried at everything she didn't know about how much I liked her, and someone put an arm around me and said,
You're feeling things, that's good
. Yeah, I said to Joey on the sidewalk, I Feel Like I Could Calm Down Some.
Awww, you're perfect
. She flipped her hand over and touched my head. Listen, we're barely here at all, I wanted to tell her, rolling over, looking into her face, we're barely here at all and everything goes so fast can't you just kiss me? My eyes were shut and the cars sounded close when they passed. The sun was weak but it baked the grime on my skin and made it smell delicious. A little kid smell. We sat up to pop some candy into our mouths, and then Joey lay her head on my lap, spent from sugar and coffee. Her arm curled back around me and my fingers fell into her slippery hair. On the February sidewalk that felt like spring.

13

One thing I did that February was give up on the seduction of Joey. Another was flip a coin about breaking up with Iris. The third noteworthy thing I did that month was place an ad in the gay personals. Bratty Little Bottom, it began, Looking For Tough Girls To Rough Me Up And Boss Me Around. God, I cringe just thinking about it. Don't Want A Girlfriend, the end proclaimed, Just A Hard Sleazy Fuck. Iris didn't have so much time for me now that her affair with Emma had blasted off. Each day another lesbian nonmonogamy boundary crumbled beneath Iris's need. She needed to see this girl on a weekend, taboo. Make plans at the last minute, break plans with me, take her to the bar where we always went and dance with her to “Rebel Girl,” our song. As it was, Iris and Emma saw each other all day at work, kissing in the
cooler of the worker-owned organic food co-op. Iris was about a day away from rent when she got that job, with practically nothing in the bank and seemingly no employment prospects. Instead of actually looking for work she was burning a green candle stamped with the word “job,” bought at the Mexican grocery on the corner. It sat glowing on her television by the bong, infusing Iris's smoky room with luck. A couple weeks before rent was due, she had decided to pull the traveler's check scam with the paltry $160 she had in her account at the credit union. I Don't Know, I said. You Can Only Do This Scam Once Because They'll Have You In Their Computer. Don't You Want To Wait And Do It With More Money? It seemed like a lot of nerve-racking work for $320, but that was Iris's rent exactly. So she got her money converted and went up into the Haight to go shopping. She did it all wrong. You're supposed to spend as little money as possible cashing the checks, but Iris came home that night with a gleaming new ceramic bong from a head shop, cute knitted hats from pricey skater shops, records. Even if the scam did succeed she'd be short on rent. She tossed
Confusion Is Sex
on her turntable and fired up her new pot toy. Then she called the check company and told them she'd been held up at knife point in a parking lot in the Mission. I rolled my eyes. It was the worst story ever, and Iris sounded like a shady weirdo telling it. What was she doing loitering in a dark parking lot in the “bad” part of town? Why hadn't she filed a police report? The last thing you want your scam story to be is complicated. A simple pickpocket, something
the lady on the phone could imagine happening to herself. Nothing that suggests your lifestyle might be unseemly and you to blame for the theft. I once heard about a girl who didn't get her money simply because the check place found out she stripped. She eventually got the cash, but she had to go to court to make it happen. The check people told Iris to file a police report about her “attack,” and to call the next day at exactly 3:00 p.m., something she remembered to do around 5:00 p.m. For a week, she just kept forgetting to call. It was clear that they did not believe her story. She gave up. She had some new gear and less rent money than ever. Then, on the way to her job interview at the food co-op, she bicycled past a phone booth with a wallet lying open on top. Hundreds of dollars inside. Iris checked the ID and verified that the owner was an acceptable person to steal from, a white-haired white man with a lot of credit cards. She took the dough and left the wallet, went to the interview and got the job. Iris. She was a beaming child of the cosmos, karma's kid sister. No matter how lazy she was, how much she fucked up, how many hearts she broke in the most careless way possible, magical things kept happening to her. Money, jobs and five sweet new girls for every one she left bitter. A halo of luck around her darling dopey head. I hated her. I realized chance was on her side, and a flip of the coin would never advise me to break up with her. I would jog alongside her romance with Emma forever, waiting for it all to end.

Nights Iris was out cavorting with Emma I went out drinking. Smoking in bars I was ok, but alone, in my room, anxiety shook
me like a teakettle. I'd come home late, drunk, and check the voice mailbox for my personal ad. I was terrified that someone I actually knew might call it. Would I recognize a voice I knew? One woman left a message telling me how she would lovingly bind my wrists to her wrought-iron bed frame and tickle me with an ostrich feather. I called the number she left. Listen, I slurred, I Meant The Part In The Ad That Said “Roughed Up.” I'm Talking About Some Serious Violence Here, So Call Back If That's What You're Looking For. I hung up. How psychotic. I wanted to be whipped into numbness by a stranger. I wanted to be slapped around until I left my body, slid into an altered state of consciousness. The next message started out good enough, a gravely girl's voice telling me she was going to take me into a filthy public toilet. But the fantasy disintegrated into the most ridiculous poop and pee scene ever, and I knew it was my insane friend Tatiana making fun of me. The burst of laughter at the end confirmed it. She had actually called from my house when I had run out to get cigarettes. I wanted to kill her. There were no other messages. Of course there weren't. I knew the name and face of every S/M dyke in town, and they all knew me, and this whole personal ad thing was a big embarrassing mistake. I flipped another penny and it told me to continue my masochistic love affair with Iris. I checked my pervy voice mail again and there was a new message and it sounded all right. From a girl who had just moved here from Boston, same place I was from, so we'd have that to talk about at least. I arranged to meet her. I have a sex date with
a stranger, I thought, hitching garters around my waist and throwing on a flouncy skirt. As long as I was able to keep my mind away from my heart, it seemed like a pretty cool situation. Brave and exciting. But my heart was a whirling, starving void that sucked and sucked like a terrible black hole, and when it gobbled up my logic it made what I was doing look lonely, and sleazy. I laced my Docs and grabbed my leather jacket.