Valencia (22 page)

The party house had a big art gallery in the front where everyone was coloring on the walls with crayons, and there was a big sketch of a bull so you could play pin the tail on the bull and win a prize. Not many people were there yet. Me and Fate went out to the backyard where there were trees and a bonfire. We sat together in uncomfortable silence. Was it ok if I drank? I had never gone on a date with a sober girl before, but since most of my crushes were drunks it seemed like a logical evolution. I got some punch and sipped it real slow. Then this big group of Fate's friends showed up, and she went off and sat with them on the porch. They were
these super-rowdy girls hugging 40s in wrinkled paper bags. I wondered if Fate had had them come to rescue her. She huddled with them on Ashley's porch, talking low and laughing loud and rolling cigarettes. I didn't talk to Fate anymore that night.
How's your date?
people asked. I Don't Think I'm On A Date, I said. I wandered around the party. Some girls showed up dressed like a mariachi band, carrying a shitty acoustic guitar stuffed with candy like a piñata. Birthday-girl Ashley got to slam it open on the floor. The girl I gave my panties to at the bar was there again, and somehow we ended up in Ashley's roommate's closet. On the floor on top of all her dirty clothes, exquisite beaded dresses swinging above our heads. We had sex and left the used glove there in all the dirty clothes, and later the girl found it. She was really grossed out.

Ok, so I finally got to sleep with Fate. Months and months later, when I didn't even care anymore, which is how those things usually happen. She was coming around my house a lot, to hang out with my roommate Sam. Fate was drinking again, we'd all get cans of beer at the New Star Market on the corner, drink them in my room, smoking cigarettes, and Fate would give me shit about my music collection. Not enough speed metal. Fate kept referring to Alcoholics Anonymous. She called it The Cult, there were all these people in The Cult trying to get her to quit her drinking. Her face was dark when she talked about it. Her asshole sober boss who pushed her to
go to meetings and then fired her when she “slipped,” picked up a bottle again and drank from it. I don't know, I could never come up with a good reason
not
to have a beer, so I completely understood. Plus, she looked good with a beer in her hand. Now she had no job and nowhere to live. She was couch-surfing, staying up in Bernal Heights, housesitting for a girl who was on tour with her band. She had me come over and give her a tarot reading. The place was empty and she had Metallica on the gigantic stereo. She sang along in a muttery way, not too showy but you understood she knew the song well and that it mattered. I don't know which song. When I spread the cards out on the big bed and Fate sprawled out next to me, belly down, I really thought we were going to have sex. But then she started crying. All the cards were bad. I didn't know what to say.
It's ok
, she said and wiped her face. I was impressed with how easily she cried in front of me. She didn't seem at all embarrassed, her slick, reddened face was opened, soaking in the meanings of all her little destinies. I looked at her respectfully, feeling ashamed and dumb for having thought she was luring me over for sex. Did I think she was a stud? I gave her some money for cigarettes and left.

A few weeks later, at the dyke bar, Fate came on to me like weather, a front of clouds, a boozy kiss and
Can I come home with you tonight?
Finally. Sure, I said. But something was off. Fate was manic drunk, I recognized it because it's the kind of drunk I get too. When the bar closed down for the night I took Fate across the street to my bandmate Tommy's house. Tommy's new girlfriend,
Bee, was in the band too, an amazing guitarist. But Tommy and Bee were cranky punk rock snobs. They adhered to the strict Pacific Northwest girlpunk tradition, as found in Portland and Olympia. Clean, grrl-positive kids with short hair and little sweaters, pegged pants and deliberate ethics. Middle-class and youth-worshiping, but with a consciousness about classism and ageism. They did not like drunken Fate, she seemed a hesher beside their streamlined aesthetic, a bull in the china shop of their kitchen. She picked up their instruments without asking and started plucking, the big taboo. She's Cool, I kept mouthing, while they kept a mother's eye on the bass held awkwardly in Fate's inebriated paws. I think she did drop it. Onto the linoleum with a thud and a twang. It was time to take Fate home.

The fucking happened so fast that by the time I realized I didn't want it, it was over. Fate fucked me quick and rough with her grubby hands, impatiently pushing fingers into me, and I understood that she didn't want it either. She was earning her keep. She only wanted to sleep, and to cuddle. She pulled her hand out of me and curled herself around my back tightly, as if there were something between us. It seemed like a brave and vulnerable thing to do, like when she cried above my tarot cards. I lay there with her foreign arm clutching me, knowing that she thought she'd earned this rest and closeness with the brief, perfunctory fuck. I had a tangled, icky feeling like a confusing, hungover morning. When I woke up, I found blood sticky on my thighs, seeping out from where her hand had torn me.

17

Spacegirl was worried about me. She thought I was dying of cancer. We hadn't met yet, she was watching me on the cafe patio as I tipped the pill bottle into my palm and knocked back the tablets. There
was
that weird bald spot on the back of my head. I remember clearly that warm day, the medicine I was taking. I had a pussy infection. Something common enough, not gonorrhea or anything, but it made my pussy smell fishy. I was supposed to keep out of the sun, and I didn't, so I got a really bad sunburn. Spacegirl was there, watching. Now that I think about it, she probably would have fallen right in love with me had I been dying. She was the kind of girl who would do really well with a weak, cancer-ridden girlfriend. She could be self-sacrificing and carry herself with a deep and noble sadness. Spacegirl had a motorcycle.
It was a piece of shit, clunky black, and she had to start it with a screwdriver. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Spacegirl stared with concern on the patio, and she cornered me later at the bar. I saw her aiming her big body at me, her boots thudding heavy on the wood floor. When I heard her speak, all her makeup made sense. I had already been exposed to the southern phenomenon of butch girls and cosmetics, so her twang explained for me the powdery film on her face, the dark red lipstick.
Are they contacting you?
she asked, incredibly serious, her fingers touching the UFOs tattooed on my arm. Aaah, No.
They will
, she nodded. Obviously Spacegirl was a prophet. She grabbed my arm and monologued me for nearly an hour, and when she was done, I went and sat alone at the edge of the dance floor, letting everything she said sink in.
It's coming
, Spacegirl had said. It was all coming and couldn't you just feel it? Couldn't you feel the end of everything, growing bigger like a hunger that chewed at your belly? Oh, I was so hungry for the end of the world right then. I was so bored. Spacegirl had been living in New Mexico where there were joint government-alien bases burrowed under the ground, enormous subterranean complexes stuffed with magnetic propulsion crafts and hybrid beings suspended in glowing tanks. Spacegirl saw them flying in the sky, she heard them pattering on her roof like elves. She left her radio on at night like that David Bowie song, and they talked to her as she slept.
I'm not scared
, she said, and nothing could do it for me like a tough girl talking shit about UFOs in a southern accent.
When
they come down I'm gonna light up a cigarette and walk right in and say, “Whaddaya all eatin', I'm cookin'.”

Spacegirl was a liar. I didn't care. She lied right to my face and I let her, pushed her to unwind these stories into vast landscapes that I wanted so badly to believe in. It is a true talent, one I've witnessed mostly in drag queens, to tell lies so detailed and glorious that your victims don't even care that they're being taken for fools, gladly they become gigantic fools, and I was a fool for Shelly. That was her real name. “Spacegirl” came about because no one would know who I was talking about so I'd have to yell Spacegirl! Spacegirl! until that's all anybody called her. Shelly was tall and looked strong, like she could really kick up some shit. Her hair was bleached and greasy with long bangs that fell into her face, pasty white with all that makeup. Her nose went up like a ski slope and her eyes were tiny. I kept trying to figure out if I liked her. The makeup threw me off, but I did know that I absolutely needed to impress her.

We were together at a bar and I was explaining the bald spot on the back of my head. Usually people think I did it on purpose, shaved a hole to be weird or cool or something. It drives me crazy. I always think they must see me as such a really dumb person to think I would do that. I was glad Shelly had thought it was cancer. Really it was a birthmark, or used to be a birthmark. This mass of bumpy brown skin, sprouting hairs, bleeding when my mother ran the brush over it, really gross. They brought me to a doctor and the doctor said if I didn't get rid of it by the time I hit puberty I could
get cancer and die, so Shelly had something right. I had to have an operation. I remember being on a stretcher, the bright lights of the ceiling whizzing by like lines on a highway. It was one of the Shriners Hospitals, where burned people came from all over the world to get better, and I was lucky to live so close to it. I saw a small boy in a wheelchair, the doctors were building him a new nose. He had two holes in his face and some bandages like scaffolding. Big doctors pushed me around like a shopping cart.
What's her name? Swankowski?
They told Polish jokes. They had a mask of gas to knock me out. Did I want bubble gum or cherry? I picked cherry and the mask came down over my face, heavy plastic and rubber, and the doctors were liars, it didn't taste like cherry, it tasted like death, thick poison death. I kicked and swung at the guy for all of three seconds and then I was out. Then I was back again, right away it seemed like, an eyeblink, but all this stuff had happened. I could feel it. I was a flat white body in a cold empty room, sickened and aching and my head was wrapped in a big bandage. I started crying. I was about seven. I had needles and tubes coming out of my hands, stuck there with bloody bits of scotch tape. I started crying for my mother, Mama, Mama, and a little old man, flat and white on his own metal bed, said,
It's ok honey, your Mama's coming
, and I was calmed. They cut the ugly birthmark off my head, and they cut a flap of skin from my ass and they stitched it to my head, to hold my brains in, I imagined. They took the skin from my ass so that no one but my husband would ever see the scar. I
figured I could never pose for
Playboy
. I got to stay out of school for a while, on my stomach on the couch, while my mother changed the bandage, peeling the gauze from my ass, tugging gently where it had begun to knit to the skin. Daubing it with Mercurochrome, so bright red and liquid that I thought it was blood, that my bum was cut and bleeding like crazy. On the end table near my head was a vase of flowers, orange tongues of tiger lilies and the fat yellow head of a sunflower. I got them for being sick, like winning a pageant. When Halloween came and I was still bandaged up, my mother took the gauze and extended it down from my head and I was a mummy. My mother was so scared that the operation would make me ugly. I had very long hair, thick and blonde and it was a big concern how much would be cut for the surgery. Would I be a freak? She held her breath when the bandage came off. The trauma of the surgery was still so recent that the new skin sat swollen and puffy on my head and my mother shrieked,
It looks like a pancake!
and passed out right there in the office. That's Why I Call It My Pancake, I told Shelly.

She was fingering her lower lip.
Well, listen to this
. Shelly grew up in a trailer park near the Everglades in Florida. She had already told me about how she saw Bigfoot there, all orange and furry, swatting for fish in the creek. But when she was like two years old a neighbor's pit bull knocked her down and bit her bottom lip off her face. Did the dog eat it, or did it lie in the dirt like a bit of meat? Shelly's mom sued the guy who owned it, there'd already been
complaints and he was supposed to keep the beast chained up. She won a lot of money and took Shelly to the best plastic surgeon. They made her a new lip. Out Of What?
Guess
, she said. She was gloating. It was impossible to impress Shelly because she would just make up a lie to top whatever story you told her.
They took a skin graft from my mother's pussy!
she screamed. Your Mother's Pussy?
My mama's pussy!
She Must Have Really Loved You, I said. Shelly wanted to leave the bar, looking around the bright darkness with wild eyes.
Let's make a movie
. Shelly claimed to have bunches of cameras, video, Super 8. I assumed she was full of shit, but she left the bar and came back with two cameras, old and silver like laser guns from a '50s science fiction movie. When Shelly actually delivered, it made me wonder if maybe she wasn't a liar, maybe her lips were fashioned from her mama's labia and the aliens were talking to her and the world was really going to end, soon, and shit would finally start to happen. We took the cameras into the street. I remember Magdalena Squalor was with us, and I was thinking shit, Magdalena is going to fall right in love with Shelly. Because Shelly was tough and southern and had a motorcycle and was obviously a freak. And plus me and Magdalena had exactly the same taste in girls—she was Iris's ex-girlfriend, responsible for bringing Iris to California. But I had finally decided to like Shelly, makeup and all, and now Magdalena was going to ruin it.