Free Valencia by Michelle Tea Page B

Anymore, and Iris just looked kind of blank and said, Ok and drove off. I honestly didn’t know what she thought about it, but I figured she couldn’t be too heartbroken if she was willing to do mushrooms with me. You have to be pretty all right with someone to get that unstable around her. I hadn’t ever done mushrooms before. Supposedly they were better than acid, in a hippie way, natural, no rat poison, but I’ve always liked those cramps you get when you’re coming down off LSD. They felt interesting, and made me really know I’d done drugs. I’d heard that mushrooms taste disgusting and I believed it, because even non-hallucinogenic mushrooms made me want to hurl. So earthy and slimy, with that weird texture you feel deep inside your ears as you chew. Like bugs. A taste like mold but worse, human mold, like musty armpits or asscrack. My other roommate, Denise, had the mushrooms. She lived at the end of the hall by the only heating vent, which blew warm air straight into her room and no place else. She brought us a plastic baggie filled with shriveled brown nuggets of fungus. We chopped them up on a cutting board on the counter and ulp swallowed. Not so bad. It took a while to hit so we ate more.
    We sat outside on the front stoop, a great place to sit, maybe the best in the city. You were connected to the absolute hub of 16th Street, but you sat in a dark corridor, apart, quieter, like 16th Street was this incredible secret and my street was the moment beforeyou told it. You had the sense that something was building, sitting in the subtle glow of the streetlights facing the bottlebrush tree sprouting freakish bristly blossoms that actually looked like bottle brushes. I had seen a bottlebrush tree once before, when I was a prostitute in Tucson. I had a call at a hotel by the freeway, and when the guy took off his pants, there was clearly something wrong with his dick, so I left. In the parking lot was the tree. I picked one of the brushes from a branch and put it on the dashboard, where the skinny scarlet needles dried in the Arizona heat and fell off. Now I had one right outside my house, growing all the way up to my window, filling the frame. A great tree. The one from which Laurel hung upside down in the rain the night she learned her friend died from heroin. Laurel was with George that night, who always had a lot of angst, and I had just discovered Eileen Myles. I was reading her little green book at my window when I saw those two moving through the wet night, the street shiny like a polyester shirt, and I yelled down to them, Wait, You Have To Hear This, and I read them “Mai Maison,” my favorite, a kind of reverse serenade, calling the words out my window, and Laurel cried and George smoked a damp cigarette and then Laurel hung by her knees from the bottlebrush tree. The tree also served as a kind of toilet bowl when you were out on the stoop drinking 40s and smoking and felt too sluggish and congested to climb the stairs to the bathroom. Or maybe you didn’t want to miss anything, so you pulled down your pants and squatted over the patch of dirt the tree grew out of.

    So the mushrooms tasted like a trunk of moth-eaten clothes, and after we ate them we went out to the stoop and waited for the world to turn weird. Laurel swinging from the tree again helped, like if we just started acting silly the stuff would kick in faster. We were impatient for the little chunks to get all shot up with acid in our bellies and leak into our bloodstreams. Can You Drink On Mushrooms? I asked. Laurel and Iris shrugged. There’s a whole purist morality that goes along with mushrooms, like it’s so good and holy, unlike LSD or cocaine or Valium, and so you should be holy and ritualistic about it and not wash it all down with beer as if the point were to get bombed, not to have a natural, enlightening experience. I bought my beer at the store around the corner. I liked walking around with