Free Valencia by Michelle Tea Page A

Back at my house later I think we just passed out. We had our first sober sex in the morning, and it freaked me out. My hands were confused, used to Willa’sbody. I got panicky. I missed my ex-girlfriend. What was I doing? I gave Iris an insincere compliment on the faded daisy tattoo on the back of her shoulder. It was a teenage Bad Judgement tattoo, and I hadn’t noticed it until we were naked and sober together in the afternoon sun of my bedroom. I told her it was cute, and then I told her I had stuff to do, and she left. I called Willa and begged her to go out with me again. I was crying. We got back together, but that didn’t make anything better. We were doomed. I was back in her bedroom with the body I knew and it didn’t mean anything. It was desperation and pure confusion. Iris got really sick from being so fucked up all weekend. She was hypoglycemic, and I hadn’t let her eat or rest. I just kept pumping her full of booze, sex and action, then sent her home to puke, pass out and alarm her roommates into carting her off to General to sit among the rest of the gay revelry casualties. She was lying on a cot with needles in her arms and doctors asking her what were all the dark red marks and scratches at her neck and if she thought she might be pregnant. And she didn’t even know I had broken up with her.

5

    I almost didn’t eat the mushrooms. Because I was in a performance and I was busy. The performance had a theme and the theme was “pep rally,” and for my perkiness and for my spunk I was chosen to organize a kind of joke cheerleading squad. I had been a cheerleader once, not in high school but in junior high, seventh grade, before cheerleading suggested anything about integrity. I knew some cheers: R-O-W-D-I-E, Devil’s Attack, Uh! Ungawa! Devils Have The Power!, which originally, back in the ’60s, went Uh! Ungawa! People Have The Power! and was a Black Power chant, though nobody told this to the cheerleaders. Imagine having your righteous mantra appropriated by some scrawny shit-town cheerleading squad. For the performance I rewrote Devil’s Attack into Summer’s Here/We’re Glad We’re Queer/Time To HaveFun And Drink Some Beer! I taught all the flailing arms and spread-eagle leaps to my squad, which consisted of Ashley, who was kind of manic, and Bobby, the cross-dressing straight boy who got a lot of play off dykes, and a third girl I didn’t know very well but who was so quiet and introverted that I worried she’d not do ok with the cheers. Then I thought that was probably a fucked-up cheerleadery thing to think—am I falling into some bad cheerleader mindset? I was rehearsing with my squad in this tiny performance space run by a really cute boy who wore those plastic riot-grrl barrettes in his hair and heavy black glasses on his face and who was always very excited and gushing over everything. He made art with liquid jello and twinkies and pink sugar frosting. On the outside his theater was metallic silver and on the inside it was a one-room schoolhouse or maybe a small chapel, the kind you find in a hospital. Wooden pews against the wall.
    My roommate Laurel came by with Iris. This was about a week after I’d ended the brief but hauntingly passionate affair. And I had ended it so poorly, in her car with the motor running after we’d gone to look at the buffalo in Golden Gate Park. It was weird that there were buffalo in the park. Behind a regular chain-link fence, grazing among the eucalyptus trees that also didn’t belong in San Francisco. The buffalo were thick and morose and their fur was coming off their backs in long strips, like the bark that was falling off the eucalyptus. I’ve heard this shedding is normal for buffalo, but it made them look so mangy and miserable. We stood at thefence and stared at them and then we got back in the car, and Iris dropped me at my house, and I said, Iris, I Can’t See You