Valencia (28 page)

One day, months later, me and Iris and Magdalena Squalor sat with plates of eggs and bread and thick gloppy sauce. Me and Magdalena needed love. Real love, not the watered-down shit that Iris squirted out. Iris was diluted, she had too many girls. Me and Magdalena wrote our personal ads on notebook paper with a purple pen. She had moved herself up from Santa Cruz, and was living in a little pink room in the Tenderloin. We laughed and talked dirty and made fun of Iris, who sulked and drank her coffee. When a cute girl tells you she's selfish, you better be listening. You better not blink and giggle to show how cute your smile is. When me and Iris roamed the summer,
I had hatched plans like hungry children that I could not support alone. We would fly in the sky to other countries, we would crawl along the dust of our own, we would rule the nighttime streets of every city. Those places mewed and scratched at my thighs and now I had nothing to feed them. Magdalena Squalor became my friend. She told me things that made my burning ears sting sharper, but I didn't want to feel good anyway. I wanted to feel terrible and I did. She told me how Emma took photo booth pictures of herself with no shirt on and gave them to Iris. She told me about a performance where Emma read words from a page while Iris sucked the dildo that hung out of her pants and it sounded so dumb but I was hot with envy anyway. She told me about the pink princess gown Emma wore to the street fair, and how Iris followed her from curb to piss-run curb. Me and Magdalena were in a special club now, and I knew that rotten girl Emma would one day need to be in it too and I for one would slam my door on her. Iris went through girls like a slash-and-burn farmer. All I had to do was lie still as dirt and wait for someone to bounce seeds off my chest.

Magdalena Squalor walked into my house and made me want to paint my eyes. Hers were black as oil beneath the hood, swooping up like wind. I looked at her and knew I must change my clothes because Magdalena Squalor knew true glamour. A thick beauty that is hurt and needing, a syrup too sweet and heavy to drink
without liquor. I dressed in my closet, we were going to a party. I spread cards on the floor to tell Magdalena her future. Magdalena looked hard at the cards but they didn't tell her what she was looking for. Magdalena needed paper pictures of green things growing, of big-bellied women, because she was trying to have a baby. For real, a secret.
I'll tell you my secret
, she said,
but if you don't like it you have to shut up because I don't want to hear it
. She was tracking her belly's dark comet so that she knew when to do it. She planned to seduce the man who gave her tattoos, breathe on his neck as he leaned between her legs, his gun at her breasts. A prayer like black ribbon across her skin. The man was a gangster, had pointed true guns at shopkeepers and left with bags of cash. He had a little boy so you knew his parts worked ok. But there was nothing like a baby in Magdalena's cards. We walked to the store and bought the worst drinks we could find, malt liquor flavored with synthetic pineapple and cherry. I wanted to be there when Magdalena's baby came, hold it wet and confused, beating against my chest like a bird. Magdalena told me about all the girls who hated her, all her enemies, the catty girls who hissed in each other's ears when Magdalena trailed her scent past them. Junked-up girls who would beat her up because someone told someone that she was a little bitch, a crazy bitch, and those girls were just sitting there high with nothing to do. Magdalena was going to tease her hair into a bubble like the cholla girls do, with evil-edged razors slid in like bobby pins, and I would dash my bottle at the tip of the curb
and hold its liquored edges to some girl's throat, I swear I would. Me and Magdalena drank our awful bottles and went to the party and Cecilia was there. She didn't know that my heart was a sand-storm waiting to open her skin in a desert of cuts. She didn't know the animal that waited in my stomach, silently shredding the walls. For her my heart wore small white shoes and carried a purse, went to bed early. I wanted to shoot myself into her arms so she understood the need to crash cars with me, to tear up pavement because we were beautiful.

Magdalena Squalor lived in the worst part of town. All by herself in a little room, and outside her window the terrible things people do were demonstrated nightly in the streets, while immigrant families slept close on pushed-together cots. I walked to her apartment with bottles of that sweet awful drink. One for me, one for Magdalena. She was moving away. Back to the South where the houses had big porches and you could sit with a baby and rock and rock. She was selling everything. When I got there girls were loading shelves into the hall, pulling the fat lazy futon across the floor, dismembering the frame. I sat on her floor and stacked books. I took the bed-sheets that bitch ex-girlfriend gave her. Not that one, a different one. Aren't they all bitches. I took a green sweater too scratchy to wear, and the worn country shirt that slipped off my shoulders. I took the thick-heeled jelly shoes that didn't fit me. I took the black
shoes she had worn on her wedding night, when she married the gay boy who needed to stay in the country. The black shoes didn't fit either, but I wore them. I took a little aquarium for my roommate who caught cockroaches and kept them as pets. I took Magdalena's little blue suitcase with a mirror on the inside, and I took her curling iron. One day my hair will be long like Magdalena's, and I will wind the locks around the hot stick and listen to them sizzle. One day I will braid my hair stiff at my neck like Magdalena, who is never happy. In the South she slits her wrists daily and drips the blood into the tank of her Camaro. She takes care of other people's babies. Magdalena Squalor, I will meet you in the dirtiest city you can dream of. We will drink cocktails so sweet they pucker our cheeks, as we perch on cracked leather bar stools. I will buy you plates of calcium and protein and we will run through the streets in excellent danger.

acknowledgments

Millions of thank-yous go out to Jennie, Kate and all the lovely ladies at Seal, to Inga Muscio, to the most amazing Eileen Myles, to Sash Sunday and Sini Anderson, and to Ginger Robinson.

© LYDIA DANILLER

about the author

Michelle Tea is the author of several books, including
The Chelsea Whistle
and the illustrated
Rent Girl
. Her novel,
Rose of No Man's Land
, was declared “impossible to put down” by
People
magazine. Her writing has been published in
The Believer, The Best American Erotica, The Best American Non-required Reading
, and
The Outlaw Bible of American Literature
. She was voted Best Local Writer of 2006 by the
San Francisco Bay Guardian
. Tea is the founder of the all-girl performance happening Sister Spit, and artistic director of Radar Productions, a nonprofit that stages underground, queercentric literary events in the Bay Area and beyond.

Selected Titles from Seal Press

For more than thirty years, Seal Press has published groundbreaking books. By women. For women. Visit our website at
www.sealpress.com
.

Word Warriors: 25 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Revolution
edited by Alix Olson, foreword by Eve Ensler. $14.95, 1-58005-221-5. This groundbreaking collection of poems and essays, the first all-women spoken word anthology, features the most influential female spoken word artists in the movement.

Cunt: A Declaration of Independence
by Inga Muscio. $14.95, 1-58005-075-1. “An insightful, sisterly, and entertaining exploration of the word and the part of the body it so bluntly defines. Ms. Muscio muses, reminisces, pokes into history and emerges with suggestions for the understanding of—and reconciliation with—what it means to have a cunt.” –Roberta Gregory, author of
Naughty Bitch

The Chelsea Whistle
by Michelle Tea. $14.95, 1-58005-239-8. In this gritty, confessional memoir, Michelle Tea takes the reader back to the city of her childhood: Chelsea, Massachusetts—Boston's ugly, scrappy little sister and a place where time and hope are spent on things not getting any worse.

She's Not the Man I Married: My Life with a Transgender Husband
by Helen Boyd. $15.95, 1-58005-193-6. Taking up where My Husband Betty left off, this moving account of a wife's examination of her relationship with her cross-dressing partner proves to be the ultimate love story.

Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity
by Julia Serano. $15.95, 1-58005-154-5. Biologist and trans woman Julie Serrano reveals a unique perspective on femininity, masculinity, and gender identity.

Working Sex: Sex Workers Write about a Changing Industry
edited by Annie Oakley. $15.95, 1-58005-225-8. A proud community of sex workers write on race, class, gender, labor, and sexuality—and give perspective on what it really means to work in the sex industry today.