4

It was the annual Youth Poetry Slam Championship. Michelle and Ziggy were invited to help score the performances and select a winner. They were shocked to be found respectable enough to be allowed around young people, and flattered that anyone thought they were so expert on poetry as to be able to form a wise opinion. But also they were sad, and confused. Did this mean they weren’t youths anymore? It is so hard for a queer person to become an adult. Deprived of the markers of life’s passage, they lolled about in a neverland dreamworld. They didn’t get married. They didn’t have children. They didn’t buy homes or have job-jobs. The best that could be aimed for was an academic placement and a lover who eventually tired of pansexual sport-fucking and settled down with you to raise a rescue animal in a rent-controlled apartment. If you didn’t want that—and Michelle and Ziggy didn’t, not yet, anyway—you just sort of rolled through the day, not taking anything very seriously because life was a bit of a joke, a bad one.

We Are Adults, Michelle said to Ziggy. That’s Why We Are Up Here And Not Down There.

Weird, Ziggy said. They sat in the risers of a dance studio and watched as teen after teen approached the microphone and delivered their wordy anthems and manifestos. Clear patterns emerged. Anger was channeled into rage against injustice. People were mad: at racism, at the cops, at teachers and parents, at the prison industrial complex and the criminalization of poverty. These kids hadn’t had a glass of water in months. Their families couldn’t afford meat. They were raised on ABC books featuring kangaroos and zebras, donkeys and gorillas, only to come of age and find them all gone the way of the dinosaur. The earth was totally busted and the youth were pissed.

Other poems got cosmic. Kids tranced out, imagining themselves the progeny of planets, of outer space, of mother earth. Within them the spirit of the banana tree, Douglas fir, wild avocado, and rainbow chard lived on. They proclaimed their ancestral lineage. Michelle heard shout-outs to Yemayá and Quetzalcoatl, to Thor and Nefertiti. The boys’ hands reached out and rubbed the air in front of them as if they were scratching records. The girls tilted their heads to the ceiling and their tones took on a faraway wistfulness, like a bunch of little Stevie Nickses.

Michelle was bored. The two of them had considered smuggling alcohol into the event—just for the transgressive thrill, just to be outrageous, not because they were alcoholics. That they had decided against it was proof they were, in fact, not alcoholics. Their hard drinking was a sort of lifestyle performance, like the artist who wore only red for a year, then only blue, then yellow. They were playing the parts of hardened females, embodying a sort of Hunter S. Thompson persona, a deeply feminist stance for a couple of girls to take. They were too self-aware to be alcoholics. Real alcoholics didn’t know they could even be alcoholics, they just drank and drank and ruined their lives and didn’t have any fun and were men. Michelle and Ziggy were not losers in this style, and so they were not alcoholics. They were living exciting, crazy, queer lives full of poetry and camaraderie and heart-seizing crushes. I mean, not that night, but generally. That night they were bored. All the teen poets sounded the same, it was sort of depressing.

They’re teenagers for god’s sake! Ziggy scolded Michelle when she complained. What were you doing when you were that age? Michelle remembered having an affair with the bisexual witch who played Frank-N-Furter at The Rocky Horror Picture Show in Cambridge. She had given him a blow job in the trunk of her best friend’s Hyundai. He hadn’t enjoyed it, he didn’t like oral sex. He thought Michelle was sort of trashy for having gone there. Michelle had only been trying to do something nice for the witch, who she thought was so cute with his long, bleached hair, and such a good Frank-N-Furter with his arched, anorexic eyebrows. She relayed the story to Ziggy.

See? Ziggy said. You were sucking dick. These kids are making art. Teenage Ziggy had been a frustrated poet with an early drug habit, scrawling fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck in her journal, for pages and pages. She still had the books, had shown them to Michelle. They were very cool to look at, having the scrawled deliberation of a Raymond Pettibon mixed with the druggie splatter of a Ralph Steadman.

The teen poets before them were so wholesome and focused and directed, so young, with such a grasp on language and the confidence to perform in front of a crowd of strangers—they were miracles, all of them. If they managed to grow up, they would go to writing programs and summer at writers’ colonies and have their fiction published in highbrow magazines, they were starting so early. It was much too late for Michelle and Ziggy. They were twenty-seven already, in no time at all they’d be thirty, terrifying. No one knew what would happen then. Michelle couldn’t imagine anything more than writing zine-ish memoirs and working in bookstores. Many of her coworkers were gray-haired and elderly so she figured she really could work there for the rest of her life, engaged in the challenge of living on nine dollars an hour. Michelle thought the only thing that would change as she entered her thirties was maybe she’d want to join a gym, but it was hard to say.

Ziggy figured she’d be dead.

On the stage an adorable boy with a wild Afro that weighed more than he did spoke a jumble of new-age nonsense into the mic.

Is He Stoned? Michelle asked Ziggy. He’s Not Making Any Sense.

Michelle did not enjoy pot, and often didn’t recognize the signs of someone being under its influence. This kid sounded like a cat had pawed across his keyboard and he was reading the results as a poem.

It’s like jazz, Ziggy explained. It’s like he’s scatting. You know? Bee diddy be bop, biddy bop, Ziggy proceeded to scat. Someone behind them hissed a shush at them. Probably the boy’s parents. On stage the poet began to beatbox, confirming Ziggy’s analysis and energizing the crowd, even Michelle. He sounded like a machine! Like a robot! How was he doing it! It was amazing! The audience began to clap along. It was impossible not to be carried away on this wave of excitement. Michelle, who loathed audience participation with a panic that approached pathology, timidly smacked her palms. Ziggy was hollering and throwing her hands in the air, making the Oo-OOOOO noise that was like a hip-hop birding call. Others responded in kind from around the studio. The boy made a sound like a needle being pulled from a record and was done. He smiled at the audience and shuffled meekly from the stage, his cloud of hair bouncing above him.

Michelle figured they were pretty much done, and then the last poet took the stage: Lucretia. Her hair was the color of faded jeans, and choppy. Everything about her was choppy—the sleeves had been sawed from her oversized T-shirt, her pants had been cropped just below the knee, high-tops puffed out around her ankles. Her face as she moved into the light was so stony it took Michelle a moment to register her as female, a recognition that immediately bled into an understanding of the teen as queer. A queer teen! Michelle turned and clutched at Ziggy wordlessly. A queer teen! Michelle and Ziggy loved queer teens. All queers loved queer teens. Queer teens triggered so much in a grown homosexual. All the trauma of their gay youths bubbled up inside them and the earnest do-gooder gene possessed by every gay went into overdrive. They wanted to save the queer teens, make sure they weren’t getting beat up at school or tossed from their homes to sleep in parks.

Nearly all the queers Michelle knew were fuckups in one way or another. Being cast out of society early on made you see civilization for the farce it was, a theater of cruelty you were free to drop out of. Instead of playing along you became a fuckup. It was a political statement and a survival skill. Everyone around Michelle drank too much, did drugs, worked harder at pulling scams than they would ever work at finding a job. Those who did have jobs underearned, quit, or got fired regularly. They vandalized and picked fights. They scratched their keys across the sides of fine automobiles, zesting the paint from the doors. Because everyone around Michelle lived like this it felt quite natural. One girl was doing an art project in which she documented herself urinating on every SUV she encountered. Everyone had bad credit or no credit, which was the worst credit. What they excelled at was feeling—bonding, falling into crazy love, a love that had to be bigger than the awful reality of everything else. A love bigger than failure, bigger than life. They clumped together in friendship with the loyalty of Italian mafiosi.

I Would Fucking Die For You, Michelle liked to tell Ziggy when they were wasted and sitting together on a curb, smoking.

I would fucking die for you too, Ziggy concurred. I would take a bullet for you. She dragged on her cigarette so powerfully the whole thing was gone in one pull. What about Stitch, would you die for her?

I Would. I Would Die For Stitch.

I would too, Ziggy nodded, without hesitation. Surely no one would ever be asked to take a bullet for another, but this was not the point. The world beyond them felt hostile, taking bullets was an emotional truth, it felt real.

On the stage the young queer seemed to know she was killing it. Michelle’s heart tore open and wept blood at the humanity of this girl’s experience. To be a butch girl in high school, to be better at masculinity than all the men around you, and to be punished for it! How everyone acts like you’re a freak when really you are the hottest most amazing gorgeous together deep creative creature the school has ever housed and you know it, somehow you know it, and everyone knows it, and no one can deal with it—oh, the head fuck of that situation, sitting on the shoulders of a teenager! Michelle’s hand was splayed on her chest like she was having a heart attack. Ziggy noticed.

Oh no, she said.

Michelle’s eyes were like a slot machine that had come up cherries. The youth looked so bitter and fierce at the smacking, stomping close of the poem, her eyes too old to be stuck in the smooth face of a teenager. She looked like she had been sustaining the ongoing tragedy of life for longer than eighteen years. Michelle’s heart had fully liquefied, was puddled somewhere else in her body.

The poet’s cheekbones were high and her tired eyes had an exotic lilt. Her dusky-blue hair, cut into no discernable style, was thick, itching to spring into curls. And her poem was good enough to win the competition.

Are We Just Picking Her Because She’s Queer? Michelle worried into Ziggy’s ear.

Ziggy shook her head. Her orange hair, separated by grease and product into individual clumps, swung like fringe. No, she’s really, really good, Ziggy said reverentially.

Better Than The Beatboxer? Michelle checked.

Better than the Beatboxer.

Beatboxing Isn’t Poetry Anyway, Michelle pointed out.

On the stage the girl accepted her trophy and did a friendly hug slash chest thump with the Beatboxer, who had come in second. Everyone who placed was masculine, had delivered poems laced with rage and anger. None of the girls, none of the little Stevie Nickses with their yearning poems of love and self-exploration, had placed. Michelle felt the sting of injustice as she observed this, then, upon remembering she was a judge, the prick of shame. She was part of the problem! Given a bit of power Michelle was no better than anyone else. Did she hate women, too? It was true she found much of the girl poetry limp and whiny, frustratingly vague. They hadn’t zeroed in on a social ill and gone to battle, they had turned their vision inward and taken the audience on a murky journey. Michelle guessed they’d all write devastating memoirs in about five years. She decided not to worry about it and went to congratulate the winner.

Mary Kay Letourneau! Ziggy shrieked, clipping her in the shoulder with their shared 40 ounce of Olde English.

What? Michelle cried. She’s Eighteen! That’s Legal!

Mary Kay Letourneau, Ziggy repeated, shaking her head. They moved together through the darkness of South Van Ness, passing Victorians protected from the street by wild invasive shrubbery and tall iron fences. The overhang of dying trees blotted the streetlights and the sidewalk was empty of people. In San Francisco’s nicer neighborhoods people with money had converted their yardscapes to pebble and driftwood, stuck here and there with spiny succulents. In the Mission nobody could afford to uproot the giants and so they eventually would tumble, crashing through a fence and onto the street, hopefully not killing anyone, blocking the sidewalk until the city came and dragged it away.

In the coming blocks hookers would suddenly materialize, women in big shoes and cheap little outfits. Sometimes Michelle would be walking alone in a similar outfit and the women would regard her skeptically, wondering if she was working their block. Men in cars would slow their roll, also inquisitive. Michelle offered smiles of solidarity to the women and flipped off the men, masking her fear with snobbish indignation, praying for them to drive away. Once, drunk, she removed a high heel and walked toward the curb as threateningly as one can with such a gait, one pump on, one pump held menacingly above her head. The would-be predator drove away. Mostly the men were simply looking to purchase sex, not terrorize anyone. Michelle understood that to truly support a prostitute meant wishing her a successful business, which translated to streets teeming with inebriated men propositioning anyone who looked slutty from their car windows. She tried to have a good attitude about it.

Michelle wrenched the 40 from her friend’s grip. She hated sharing anything with Ziggy, who bogarted the booze and whose strangely wet lips soaked cigarette filters. Once Michelle hit her Camel Light only to have Ziggy’s saliva ooze from the spongy tip. Ziggy would not take a languid, gentle inhalation but a stressed-out trucker pull, one and then another, making the cigarette hot, the tip a burning cone. Michelle did not know what to do with such a cigarette. She would rather buy Ziggy a carton of Camels than share a smoke with her, but she was stuck. Ziggy was her best friend and everyone was broke.

Ziggy was both scandalized and delighted by Michelle’s love-at-first-sight encounter with the teenager. Her walk when newly drunk became a sort of dance, she swiveled out from her hips as she slid down the street. Like many butches, Ziggy dealt with her feminine hips by weighing them down with a lot of junk. A heavy belt was threaded through the loops of her leather pants. The word RAGGEDY was spelled in metal studs across the back, as if you could not simply see for yourself. All the dykes had recently discovered the shop in the Castro where leather daddies got their belts, vests, caps, and chaps. A bearded fag resembling the Greek god Hephaestus would pound the word of your choice into the leather with bits of metal. It was expensive, but worth it if you had it. Ziggy went from rags to riches regularly, scoring jobs at yuppie restaurants and then slipping on a wet floor and throwing her back out. She blew her cash on leather goods and rounds of tequila for everyone, plus some cocaine and maybe a nice dinner in a five-star restaurant where service people treated her like a pig. Whatever was left over was given away to people on the street, and then it was back to bumming cigarettes off her friends.

But Ziggy’s hips: a Leatherman was snapped to the belt, like a Swiss Army knife but more so. The gadget flipped open into a pair of pliers with a world of miniature tools fanning out from the handles. Screwdriver, corkscrew, scissors, tweezers. The Leatherman was a lesbian phenomenon and life ran more smoothly because of it. Ziggy had that on one hip and a Buck knife in a worn leather sheath on the other. A hankie forever tufted from her back pocket, corresponding to the infamous faggot hankie code. The hue, pattern, or even material flagging from Ziggy’s ass transmitted the desire for a particular sexual activity, right or left pocket communicated whether the butch would prefer the giving or receiving end. Ziggy’s tastes were varied and shifting and hankies of many sort danced between her pockets. That night a flash of lamé dangled from her right cheek, signaling her wish to be fucked by a fancy femme.

In Ziggy’s other pocket sat a leather wallet, hooked to her belt loop with a swag of silver chain. The nights Ziggy packed, yet another layer of leather and metal would be rigged across her hips, a heavy dildo curled in her underwear. The overall affect of these accessories was not unlike a woman dancing the hula in a skirt of shells and coconuts, or belly dancers draping their bellies in chain mail. The swinging, glinting hardware propelled Ziggy forward from her core, and, though your eyes were drawn to the spectacle, the flash obscured the femininity—like dazzle camouflage. A lot of butches wore this look, but Ziggy did it best.

Gay Men Fuck Younger Boys All The Time, Michelle said fiercely.

Okay, NAMBLA, Ziggy snorted. Okay, NAMBLA Kay Letourneau.

Not Like That, Michelle said. Just—You Know What I Mean. Older Fags And Younger Fags, Like Legally Young. Daddies. Zeus And Ganymede.

Ganymede was a child, Ziggy schooled her.

Yeah, You Were There, Michelle retorted, On Mount Olympus. You Were Working The Door. You Carded Ganymede. Michelle’s joke reminded her of a true story in which Ziggy picked up a girl with hair so short there was almost nothing for her Hello Kitty barrettes to clamp onto and who wore a pink dog collar around her neck. The girl left her ID on Ziggy’s bedroom floor by accident. She hadn’t been old enough to get into the bar where Ziggy’d seduced her.

That’s not the same thing, Ziggy defended. That girl lied to me. Just by being in the bar she was pretending to be at least twenty-one. That was not my fault.

So, Michelle said, If That Poet Lied To Me About Her Age It Would Be Okay?

It’s too late, Ziggy said scornfully, swigging the Olde English. You met her at the Teen Poetry Slam. It is too late for you, NAMBLA Kay Letourneau. Ziggy’s hips swiveled as she skipped along. She sashayed down the block, nearly running into a shriveled old crackhead woman who had emerged from the mouth of an SRO hotel. At least Michelle thought she was old. She might have been thirty, but crack is such an evil potion it turns maidens to hags in a season.

You know what to do!!!! the woman croaked in a prophetic timbre. Her lips were split with dehydration and cancer. Do it! Do! It! Do it now! Do it now! Michelle and Ziggy looked at one another, alarmed. Lifelong city dwellers, both were accustomed to the spooky public outbursts of addicts and crazy people, but Ziggy tended to treat them as oracles dispensing coded messages.

Do what?! Ziggy asked, suddenly desperate. Do what?! Oh god! I feel like that woman just looked into my soul! Ziggy’s eyes got the focused-unfocused look that only a drunk Pisces with eyes that color green could achieve. She retraced her steps and pulled a palmful of coins from the tight front pocket of her leather pants. She placed them in the woman’s chickeny hand.

You know, she told Ziggy. A bright piece of her fabric wound around her head and her eyes stared out from the cave of her face. You know!

I do, Ziggy replied solemnly.

Michelle thought Ziggy was probably crazy herself, but there was a chance she wasn’t and that the street people of her neighborhood were, in fact, prophets, apocalyptically wise, witches damaged from being born into a time with no respect for magic. Michelle preferred this story over the alternative of everyone having chemical imbalances and genetic predispositions toward alcoholism. She supported Ziggy and helped her puzzle out the cryptic warning of the street oracle.

Is There Anything You Think You Should Do Right Now? Michelle asked.

Ziggy thought.

Write a novel? she mused. Ziggy stuck to poetry, but it was hard to make money as a poet and Ziggy really liked money. Another option was moving to Los Angeles to direct films but that seemed like such an intense thing to do. Apply for a grant? She dug deep. I was thinking about doing yoga, she said. Recently Ziggy had briefly dated a bicurious yoga instructor who kicked everyone’s ass at pool. Prana, the girl, smiled after sinking the final ball, raising her fingers to the barroom ceiling in a spiritual gesture.

You Want To Do Some Yoga And Improve Your Pool Game? Michelle asked. One of the errant ways Ziggy brought in extra cash was pool sharking. Another was shining shoes with an old-fashioned shoeshine kit she lugged from bar to bar, a butch version of those Peachy Puff girls selling cigarettes and candy and useless light-up plastic roses. Just as the Peachy Puffs wore ridiculous and sexy costumes resembling the spangled outfits little girls tap dance in, Ziggy knew which garments would appropriately fetishize her labor. She shined shoes in a stained wifebeater and a tight pair of Levi’s.

Maybe She Was Talking To Me? Michelle suggested. Do It. Like Make Out With The Poet.

The teen, Ziggy corrected.

Lucretia, Michelle insisted. But the name was such a mouthful. Was it her real name? she wondered. San Francisco was full of people who changed their names upon moving to town. Trash Bag, Spike, Monster, Machine, Scout, Junkyard, Prairie Dog, Flipper, Oakie, Fiver, Kiki, Smalley, Rocks, Rage, Sugar, and Frog were only some of the individuals Michelle had met since coming to California. I don’t think you should do it, Ziggy said.

The thing was, Michelle had a girlfriend. Her last name was Warhol so everyone called her Andy, though the name on her driver’s license was Carlotta. Andy was on a lesbian soccer team. Michelle liked to watch her spike the ball with her head like an aggressive seal. Andy cooked meals at an AIDS hospice in the Castro. She was older than Michelle and had been doing this for many, many years and had been around for the terrible era when gay men were dying and dying and dying and dying. Michelle had assumed Andy prepared healthful, nourishing, life-prolonging foods for these men, but as they all had death sentences what she did was cook them their last meals, again and again. Pork chops, ribs, mashed potatoes, mac and cheese, fried chicken. Hamburger Helper when it was requested (and it was). Meat loaf, loafed from whatever meat could be found. Cupcakes and brownies and pies with ice cream. Andy fed Michelle, too. It was a foundation of their relationship. Without Andy there were many times when Michelle would have gone hungry, so broke and barely employable was she, so hell-bent on prioritizing liquor above food. Wasn’t Beer Bread? Michelle asked in earnest. Liquid Bread? Especially Guinness, didn’t they give Guinness to pregnant women in some country (Ireland she supposed), and wasn’t Michelle Irish, didn’t years of ethnic evolution give her a genetic gift for absorbing the nutrients in a pint of beer?

Generally, people who did not drink like Michelle—let’s call it heavily—generally, these types of people would not want to date her. It was unusual how Andy not only accepted Michelle’s inebriation but encouraged it. She bought her jugs of beer beyond Michelle’s normal price range. She procured pills from folks at work and urged Michelle to take them. This dynamic inspired in Michelle a variety of emotions. Sometimes she felt like a helpless princess being attended to by a handsome butch. When Andy was a little girl she prayed to unicorns to not get boobs, and it worked. Andy was white as a ghost with a head full of black, black hair. Her black hair fell into a natural Superman swirl on her forehead. Andy was attractive in the manner of an old-fashioned movie star, Michelle thought, or maybe it was her chivalry, if chivalry was what it was. Sometimes Michelle worried that Andy just wanted to knock her out so that she didn’t have to deal with talking to or fucking her. Michelle tended to never shut up and she wanted big drama in bed all the time, requiring her lover to be a roller coaster or tsunami.

Michelle and Andy were not faithful to one another. Theirs was a messily open relationship, one in which the boundaries were never fully articulated so could never be fully broken. In spite of this, there was the feeling that Michelle was shitting on the rules all the time with her haphazard acquisition of lovers.

An example: She had an affair with a junkie troubadour named Penny. Penny sang Johnny Thunders songs on her acoustic guitar as they walked through the industrial wasteland of her neighborhood, Dogpatch, a place not yet gentrified, with vacant storefronts and SRO hotels, in one of which Penny lived. Penny had tangled black hair that clawed out from her head like Medusa. She wore spandex pants and clunky boots with broken zippers. The boots barely stayed on her feet so there was always the exciting possibility that Penny would wipe out. Walking down the street with her was like watching a circus acrobat. Penny’s small room was padded with thrift-store clothing, mounds of it. They made out on a mattress on the floor, a muted black-and-white television strobing behind them.

In the morning, though, panic woke Michelle like an alarm clock. Who was this elegant skeleton she was curled into? This hair had a new smell, the dusty stink of Aqua Net Extra Super Hold and a drugstore perfume worn as a joke and also dirt and sweat and the tang of heroin itself, brown sugar and spoiled wine. Though Penny was who she’d wanted last night, slow kisses tasting of new intoxicants, Andy was who she wanted to wake up with, the shore she longed to beach herself upon. Michelle peered through makeup-crusted eyes at the collection of clothes making drifts up the walls—she would be smothered in an earthquake. Penny shambled out of bed, so frail in the daylight, and rutted through the base of a pile, extracting something that shimmered like the scales of a magical fish. She pulled it over the torn slip dress she’d passed out in and left to throw up in the bathroom down the hall.

Michelle fled. She wheeled about Dogpatch, an unfamiliar neighborhood. The apocalyptic times that were upon them glared from every bit of rubble, every mound of festering shit left by the packs of wild dogs she hoped she would not run into. Did buses even run out here? How had she arrived? Penny had met her on the corner, with her guitar. She had strummed “You Can’t Put Your Arms around a Memory,” singing it with a cracking voice. Penny really was like a girl Johnny Thunders. Someone had tattooed the lyrics to “Chinese Rock” on her shoulder with a sewing needle. It was a spidery tattoo, the lines shook crooked down her skin, but it worked with her look.

Penny was indeed amazing, but Michelle worried there was a time limit on that sort of amazing. That it was the sort of amazing that could begin to look sad with age. Michelle fought against this analysis, which seemed cruel and typical. The messed-up queers Michelle ran with tempted fate daily, were creating a new way to live, new templates for everything—life, death, beauty, aging, art. Penny would never be pathetic, she would always be daring and deep, her addiction a middle finger held up to proper society. Right? Right?

Andy had her own love intrigues, one with a shy photographer who’d grown up in Alaska. Andy insisted that this was not as glamorous as it sounded. Alaska! Michelle projected sleighs and fur coats onto the girl, who she had never met but whose name was, amazingly, Carlotta, same as Andy’s. Like getting to go into the same public restroom, having a date with your exact name was a whimsical perk of lesbianism. Michelle imagined this Carlotta as a femme twin of Andy, standing on a windswept glacier wearing a fluffy hat cut from the pelt of a baby seal. No matter that the glaciers had long ago melted into floods and that baby seals were cartoony memories surviving on as stuffed animals. Unlike some of the younger people she was friends with, Michelle had remembered the hype of Alaska, had seen it on TV, had understood the state’s brand. But all it had had going for it was the natural abundance thing, so when the planet started to die, Alaska had been one of the first states to tank.

Michelle was, for the most part, happy that Andy was having affairs, unless she wasn’t, and then she would demand painful information from her girlfriend.

Did You Touch Her Boobs? Michelle interrogated. Did You?

Andy bristled under these demands and the pair fought. Michelle hated when a pane of lead came down over Andy’s heart, Andy who was always so ready to serve her, to bring her eggs and cider. Where had she gone? Michelle was in tears.

I Only Want To Know If You Touched Her Boobs! she cried. Andy was Michelle’s girlfriend. She had a right to know.

Michelle had a second affair with a mannish girl named Captain who hosted lots of drugged-out after-parties in her bedroom above Valencia Street. Andy rarely stayed out late, but Michelle often did not make it back to her futon until the nighttime sky began to brighten with the coming day. Michelle’s calculations were as anxious as a vampire’s—she had to be asleep before sunrise or she would panic that her life was out of control, but the inevitable end of a party always broke her heart. She would push it to the extreme last moment, dashing down Valencia in a pair of shoes so worn-down that the nub of a nail stuck out from the heel, one step ahead of the rising sun.

In Captain’s room everyone listened to Pavement and Elliott Smith and licked powdered pyramids of ecstasy from their palms. Before Michelle fell into debilitating bliss, she and Captain bonded over astrology and Captain let her pluck a card from her Salvador Dali tarot deck. Paralyzed by the drug, they made out on Captain’s bed for about five hours, their friends heaped around them like the sea lions that once honked down at the piers. Latecomers brought nitrous and the crack and hiss of the slender canisters became the sound track to their slow-motion kisses. On and on this went, time made obsolete by chemicals. Captain was not an amateur—her windows were hung with black curtains, the room as immune to the passage of time as a Vegas casino.

Michelle and Captain went on a date to the bathroom of the lesbian bar. Michelle’s ass, perched on the sink, bumped the cold-water faucet as she came in Captain’s face, soaking her backside and wetting Captain’s long bangs. She mopped up with scratchy paper towels and left to meet Andy for dinner. Rushing through the Mission, Michelle gave her hands a sniff. Captain had allowed Michelle to ransack her and Michelle’s fingers stunk of her good fortune. She popped into a liquor corner store and purchased a pack of watermelon Bubblicious, chewed a piece until it was fattened and gritty with sugar and spit, and scoured her hands with it. Her hands were sticky and disgusting but they smelled like fruit, not sex, and Michelle felt better. Andy knew she was being a slut, but she didn’t have to rub her girlfriend’s nose in it.

Together, Andy and Michelle had an affair with a girl named Linda. Michelle had found Linda at the bookstore where she worked and was excited by the girl’s willingness to consume large quantities of drugs and alcohol. Sometimes Michelle felt resentful toward Andy for being so moderate, for sipping some ridiculous fake drink like a daiquiri while Michelle got hammered on shots and cocaine. Andy would go home at a reasonable hour, abandoning Michelle at the bar, but Linda would party until her intake knocked her out. On their second date Michelle petted the girl’s head as it hung out the window of a party, sending streams of barf onto the street below. When she was finished the pair found a closet in a bedroom and had sex, Linda’s forearms, tattooed with rockets, shooting into Michelle’s deep space. Eventually Michelle flipped Linda, working her hand inside the girl for about ten minutes before realizing she had passed out. Michelle put her clothes back on and rejoined the party, leaving Linda tucked beneath a leather coat.

Andy could recognize the threat of Linda. Unlike Penny or Captain, virtual one-night stands, Michelle kept returning to Linda. She talked about her too much, in that wistful way. Everything about Linda became sort of magical. She Wants To Own A Flower Shop, Michelle gushed. That’s Her Big Dream, Isn’t That Sweet? Andy thought it was actually pretty stupid, seeing as how there weren’t really flowers anymore, and her concern swelled. Michelle loved the tattoos on Linda’s calves, the Little Prince on one leg and Tank Girl on the other. When Andy named six other girls who had either one of those tattoos, Michelle iced her for the rest of the day. Linda wore slips as dresses, just like Michelle. She wasn’t butch and wasn’t femme, she was kiki, a 1960s throwback. Her hair was sort of greasy, which was right for the time. People were buying expensive hair products to make their locks hang as limply as Linda’s home-cut bob. She would bundle the length of it into twin buns on her head, like animal ears. Linda’s face was round, and since Michelle was so often looking up at her in darkness she began to think of it as the moon, the way it caught the light and glowed. Linda was raised in a hippie commune in Vermont. She was so obsessed with corn dogs she planned on getting one tattooed on her shoulder.

Andy conceded defeat and joined their affair, which had the desired result of squashing it. Everyone felt bad at the end. Linda had bitten Andy on the lip and given her a cold sore, so now Andy quietly held Michelle responsible for having contracted oral herpes. Michelle felt like her libido was out of control and this made her feel crazy and ashamed. Linda felt that where she perhaps should have had boundaries she in fact had none. She started hanging around with Ziggy, staying out all night and showing up for her morning shift at the bookstore looking positively greenish.

What Did You Guys Do? Michelle asked Linda after one such evening. Michelle had been home in bed with Andy, watching television and eating popcorn. She was trying to live a different life, and was worried about her ex, if that’s who Linda was.

I smoked crack, Linda whispered, scandalized by herself.

Oh My God! Michelle gasped, Be Careful! She tried to talk to Ziggy about it later. Don’t Smoke Crack With Linda, she begged her friend. Ziggy was tough and could handle herself in the druggie jungles of the Mission, but there was something vulnerable about Linda, something defenseless. Michelle could imagine her falling into the gutter and never coming back. She was too gentle, she’d be a goner. Michelle would find herself giving Linda spare change as she walked home from a bar five years from now.

Ziggy was annoyed at Michelle getting all nosy about Linda. Linda’s fine, she said. Linda’s a grown-up. Ziggy resented Michelle’s suggestion that she was a bad influence on the girl, plus a little hurt that Michelle wasn’t worried about her drug intake, too. She had initiated the crack adventure and consumed far more of it than Linda. What did that say about her, then? Was she already written off as a waste case, beyond help? Ziggy thought there was maybe no one in the world that worried about her. The conversation had made her feel terribly alone, and a fracture thin as a spider web had begun to climb the surface of their friendship.

Linda wasn’t all that long ago, Ziggy reminded Michelle as she pondered the teen poet Lucretia. Michelle had made many pledges to Andy, both spoken aloud and deep in her heart. I Will Never Do That Again, she had promised, referring to Linda. How many lovers did a person need, anyway? Why was she so greedy? In her heart she prayed to whatever was listening, Please Don’t Let Me Forget How Much I Love This.

Later, she was lying fully wrapped around her girlfriend, her face nuzzled in the glossy sweet stink of her pomaded hair. Royal Crown, the grease came packed in such an aesthetically pleasing container, squat and round, its tin cover pin-poked into a relief of a royal crown. It was rumored to be Elvis’s pomade, and even Michelle would rub some into her long, wet hair to make it fragrant and less burned-out looking. It smelled like oily flowers, like the worn pillowcases of long-ago lovers. Michelle worried as she pushed her face into her girlfriend’s hair that the product would give her zits, but she did it anyway, feeling devotion surge through her: Please Don’t Let Me Forget How Much I Love Andy. But she would.