Valencia (14 page)

So back to Donna darting around the club trying to score drugs. Me and Iris went into the girls' room and I ate her pussy in one of the stalls. We were still in that phase of the relationship, barely. Back at the bar Donna was drugless, going on about the Butchest Woman in Chattanooga who thought she was so tough and cool and kept stealing everyone's girlfriend. I was dying to see her. Show Me, Show Me!
She's the one in the red vest over at the bar
, Donna said, flicking a dismissive hand in the woman's direction. Donna was bitter. I guess she got a girl swiped, one with long red hair that curled thick like a princess. The Butchest Woman in Chattanooga had come and swept her away. I had to see. I sashayed over to the bar and spotted a red leather vest like the one Billy Idol wore in the poster I had above my bed in eighth grade. Here it rested on this woman with the biggest blonde hair, bleached and teased to brittleness. Heavy eye shadow and gobs of lipstick. Amazing. This was the Butchest Woman in Chattanooga, the set of her jaw affirmed it, the way she stood and the way she held her cigarette. I watched her slug her beer at the bar and then went back to Iris.

Alan Gold's closed and Donna, having failed on the cocaine quest, was determined to at least have pot. We drove in her car to
the home of some paranoid lesbians who were up watching a talk show. They didn't seem to like me and Iris. Their suspicious scowls kept us hovering by the door, squinting at the television. They gave Donna a bulging bag of green and we left.
It was free!
she squealed happily, climbing into the car.
They owe me
. Back at Donna's house Iris rolled joints and I was at the television, trying to find the talk show the drug dealers had on. Pot makes me feel like I forgot to drink my coffee. I did not want any of the smoldering cigarette, and I did not want a sniff from the tiny brown glass bottle Donna had brought out of her bureau drawer. Poppers. They sold them at the porn store where she worked. Iris and Donna were holding the bottle under their noses and falling back against the wall. Like in grade school when we all made ourselves pass out by hyperventilating and squeezing the sides of our throats. It was head cleaner for video-tapes, making them giggle all slumped against the wall. Something like that. I felt old and cranky. I wanted to sleep. For some reason I was actually caring that poppers killed brain cells. I don't know what was wrong with me. Donna had an original Howard Finster and that was kind of impressive, a wooden animal like a giraffe, all covered with his rambling scrawl, stuff about god and visions. But I hated Donna's house. The kitchen was under construction, with a plaster-filled sink plopped in the middle, and the bedroom had this depressing yellowy lightbulb. Donna was fanatically trying to get Iris to smoke more and more pot.
I'm really stoned
, Iris said weakly, her big blue Pisces eyes full of smoke and water.
I never see you!
Donna protested.
Come on, finish the bag with me
. It was kind of twisted, the obsessive hospitality of a southern drug addict. Donna gave us her bed and went off to sleep somewhere in the kitchen debris. Me and Iris climbed under the blankets and she started up this little role play that disgusted me, pretending we were two slobs in a filthy apartment watching crappy TV. I'm Really Not Into It, I said, and went to sleep before I got any grouchier.

The next day we hopped into Iris's mom's car, nicer than George's unregistered station wagon, and drove to this Fort Oglethorp tattoo shack, the one with the air-brushed sign advertising Cherokee, Lady Tattooist. Inside was Cherokee, nodding out on a busted naugahyde seat, a mile-long ash burning in her hand. We came back the next day, and she was looking more alive, so I had her put a flaming heart on my arm, the word “lezzie” stretched across a banner in shaky script. Cherokee didn't even flinch at my request. She and her chatterbox husband told us stories about these legendary lesbians who dropped by occasionally to “get some work done.” One in particular was real rough and tended to get into fistfights with men. I was dying for her to walk in, but it was just me and Iris in Cherokee's cramped little tattooing space. She burned incense and played a tape of Celtic chanting music as she sank the colors into my arm, saying,
Don't try to be a hero. This gets too much for you, just let me know an' we'll take a break
. A nice switch from sadistic Picasso of Tucson, Arizona. Talking about how big burly men bust out crying at the sound of the tattoo gun,
but women, they're stronger.
Lezzie?
she asked.
L-E-Z-Z-I-E?
I nodded. There I was in the middle of nowhere, having to play straight for an aging Baptist family I didn't even know, tattooing “lezzie” on my shoulder. Crying out for help, obviously. I thought about the peaceful Virgin Mary while Cherokee ran the burning gun over my arm. She bandaged me up, and I gave fifty dollars to her and fifty dollars to Billy Joe in the other room, who had tattooed Siamese fighting fish on Iris's shoulder. Back into Mom's car and home with our newly ornamented bodies.

We were deeply bored. We went to the homecoming parade. Iris's schoolteacher sister worried about our little adventure and warned us to behave. She did not want to be known as the girl with the lesbian sister. In a campy way I was excited about home-coming, a piece of Americana I had never experienced. It was fall in Georgia and the air stank of it, the sweet rot of discarded leaves. It smelled like being a kid picking apples in New England, and felt good to be out of San Francisco where the weather is so complacent, to be in a place where seasons actually change and time is in motion. There is something very traditional about fall, so it felt correct that this home-coming thing was happening. To show my momentary support for alienating American traditions, I put on Iris's old varsity jacket, blue satin with “Trojans” on the back. I wore it and my green hair to the high school. No one knew what to do. They were too surprised to beat us up. Iris had a good-sized piece of steel stuck through her eyebrow. Maybe they thought we were
crazy and felt no pain. We watched the “floats” go by, cars filled with members of all the high school clubs—the future home-makers, the different levels of cheerleaders, the young blocky boys on the football team, all tossing candy. This was not my high school experience. I went to a vocational high school, a purgatory where losers go to learn a “skill” before being released upon the world. You took plumbing or cabinet-making or sheet metal. If you were a girl you did data processing, cosmetology or graphic arts, like I did. You smoked pot in the courtyard. If you were a girl you got pregnant. No shiny carloads of future homemakers and wholesome cheerleaders tossing bits of candy to the townspeople. The cheerleaders at my high school were sluts. In fact, all the girls were sluts. No slutty looking girls were at this homecoming. There were some slight weirdos, three young girls with hair wraps and Nine Inch Nails shirts who wandered over to ask about my hair. Iris got all excited when she saw them then walk down toward the creek, because that's where she used to go to sneak cigarettes in high school.
Let's go follow them
, she cried, but first we had to go back to the car to get our pack so we could bum a light and seduce them. By the time we got there, the girls were gone. It was just me and Iris on a rock above the slow-running creek that swarmed with flies. And, up a little closer to the street, three new girls, little fifth graders who were watching us kiss. Of course you want to visit the place that shaped the girl you're in love with, watch all her stories spring up around you, and you get to walk right through them. You just don't
realize how you have to undo yourself to walk down the streets. The kids started yelling at us.
Faggots! Homos! Are you a boy or a girl? Go commit suicide!
yelled the ringleader, a whiny-voiced girl with long blonde hair and babyfat. It was so precise, “go commit suicide.” Not “drop dead” or even “go kill yourself.” Like she'd heard the story, at church or at home, that homosexuals kill themselves because their filthy lives make them so miserable.
Come up here
, she challenged us,
come on up here
. She wasn't even scared of us. We were Big Kids, we could kick her ass, but someone had told her that people like us can't fight. You Come Down Here! I yelled, and I was prepared to dump her ass in the creek if she did. I Don't Care How Old She Is, I told Iris, and thought about how great it would be if we missed her sister's wedding because we drowned a ten-year-old girl in the creek and had to skip town.

So we'd been stuck in Georgia so long we had exhausted our tiny supply of activities. By then it was starting to feel like my home-town, too. The novelty of the Waffle House waitresses calling out my hash brown orders had faded completely. Earlier I'd been sad that we couldn't drive down to Athens to see L7 because it would interfere with the wedding. Now I didn't care. Of course we couldn't leave, of course we would remain here, in this town, Chickamauga, Georgia, forever. Lying on the couch, hiding from evil fifth graders, breathing the toxic carpet, never having sex because the television
had sucked up our libidos like it did little Carol Ann in
Poltergeist
. But from deep in our boredom Iris came up with one more activity. We would find Trent. Iris had had a thing with this boy when she was about sixteen or seventeen years old. Trent had been about thirteen or fourteen, and while three years is not a big deal, at that point on the adolescent development timeline it usually means someone is being corrupted. Trent and Iris would drive around in her mom's car or hang out in secret places, smoking cigarettes and making out. He was probably the closest thing to a dyke she could find at the time: a scruffy, alienated skaterboy. They never had sex, but a letter he wrote her made it sound like they did, and when Trent's snoopy mother found it she went nuts. She went down to Iris's house screaming about statutory rape, she was going to call the cops, she was yelling all kinds of names at Iris, who sat on the couch beside Trent, rubbing his back as he cried. Iris couldn't even let anyone know they were kissing, so the story was that she had befriended him and he had developed a fantastical little crush on her. She was ordered never to speak to Trent again. For a little while they snuck around, and then Iris just heard about him through her mother, a school guidance counselor, explaining to young boys in confederate flag t-shirts why it was dangerous to huff gas. I laughed at gas huffing when Iris first told me about it, but apparently it's a serious problem in rural areas. Like satanism, suspicious piles of ash out in the woods, beneath trees carved with evil numbers and goat heads. Young kids dying or going retarded from inhaling gas
fumes. It sounded so
Hard Copy
. Iris's sedate southern town was festering under the surface. The sheriff was corrupt, he was having teenage boys run cocaine for him, murder was involved. One boy was stockpiling guns for the oncoming revolution, but it was hard to figure out where he was coming from. Was he good or bad. He didn't like the government, but still something was fishy.

And these were the kids Trent was still palling around with. Iris's mom was concerned for him, and Iris decided we had to check up on him and remind him that life existed beyond this small town of gas huffing and drug rings. We drove out to his house. Iris couldn't ring his bell, still scared of his mother, so I was elected to prance up to the door with some cockamamie story of who I, the green-haired boygirl, was. But when we pulled up, another car was already there, boy forms shifting around inside.
Yell “Trent,”
Iris nudged me. Trent!
Who's that?
called a voice, all suspicious. Just Come Over, I hissed. I don't know what I was expecting. Iris did have a thing for teenage boys, hair buzzed and shaggy, clothes baggy, young enough for their facial hair to be cute, flipping up a skateboard with attitude. Trent had a horsey face and whiskers that made his chin look unwashed. His brown hair was just kind of regular, and he wore a baseball hat, brim forward. Trent was so excited when he saw it was Iris, he hopped right into the mess of CDs and granola that cluttered our back seat. We still hadn't cleaned it out from our road trip. Tape cases crunched under Trent's work boots. He had been so cautious approaching the car because the cops
were monitoring him and his friends, sitting around in parked cars noting the traffic at his house. He told us all about it. The cops were out to get him 'cause they knew he was dealing drugs. They'd already raided his house once, on a neighbor's tip, and his mom had all but given up on him.
She's still a bitch
, he said to Iris, and to me,
Do you know we used to go out?
Aaah . . . Yeah, I replied. Iris looked mortified. She Told Me All About It, I said.

We drove over to the liquor store to buy a case of Bud. It was a fortunate score for the boys that these girls old enough to buy beer had pulled up. Trent handed me a sweaty wad of bills and coins and in I went. Dumped it in the car and we hit the road. I had no idea where we were going but at least we were off the couch. Iris swerved us through dark winding roads, nothing but fields on either side, and Trent was telling us about how he'd driven this road on a bunch of acid and didn't crash even though kids were always wrecking out there after drinking or gas huffing or whatever it is they're all doing. We pulled up to this crappy little house with a BMW parked in the dusty front yard.
He gets all this money and that's what he spends it on
, said Trent. The boy who lived in the lousy house had short dark hair and was sweet and excited about San Francisco.
Are there skaters out there?
he asked.
Man, I bet there're
tons
of skaters out there!
Another boy was inside, sitting at the end of the couch, not saying a word the whole time. He was extremely pretty, with filthy ringlets of hair on his head, and you could tell from the pout on his face he was probably an asshole.
So we were drinking Budweiser and watching MTV in this room with an enormous dead deer mounted to the wall, along with guns and a great big bow and arrow. There was a dad crashing from speed in the next room, and every few minutes the dark-haired boy would say,
Hey we really gotta be quiet
, in this scared voice. At one point the dad grunted from behind the door and the boy went pale and moved us into his bedroom. Could it be that I'd never been in a teenage boy's bedroom before? He had skateboard ads ripped from
Thrasher
hung on his wall in a random pattern that looked very planned. The boy knelt before an impressive stereo and fiddled with CDs.
Do you like Danzig?
he asked earnestly.
Do you like the Beastie Boys?
He had one of those glass orbs that shoot violet lightning out from the center, and after submitting to some of Trent's pot I was thoroughly mesmerized by it. Someone noticed that the light pulsated to the beat of the music and we all sat quietly and watched it dance to Danzig's growls. I was incredibly stoned. Trent kept handing me beers before I could drain the can I was working on. I was sitting on a bed and somewhere on the dark-brown bedspread a light-brown cockroach was crawling. I tried to keep my eyes on it, but I was stoned, so I kept losing it. I was dumb from the pot and just sat there while they talked about how cool San Francisco was and how boring it was in Chickamauga and school sucked and they were just going to quit and grab their boards and go west. Iris loved these boys, I could tell. She wanted to be them. She was them. I should've just gone into the
other room and let them all jerk off on an Oreo or whatever secret thing teenage boys do together.