Yesterday I couldn’t feel my feet when I ran in the dirt around the reservoir. My legs were numb. Two miles in and nothing but helium in my skin. My brain hovered above me, watching. What’s different about today? I thought.

Did I eat sugar? Am I dehydrated? Am I hungry? In the nearby grass, a toddler carried a big red ball that was so enormous he could barely hold it and walk at the same time. He couldn’t see over the ball, and hobbled along then finally lost his balance. He wobbled and I thought he’d fall on his ass, but he didn’t. He carried the ball further until he reached his parent. That sums up the magnitude of love lost. Maybe we’re not supposed to get over it; maybe loss a big red ball we carry with us while forge ahead on shaky legs.

Most would agree that break ups are horrendous, but the one that changed me the most was Sean. Sean reeked of pot and donuts and had electric moss green eyes and deep brown skin and Angelina Jolie lips. He was in a band and rode motorcycles and had anger issues and Mom issues and ex-girlfriends who followed him around for years and he would occasionally fuck them, especially after we’d had a fight.

I moved from SF to LA even though everyone said, “never move to another city for a guy.” Initially, I broke it off. “I’m not moving to LA. I hate LA,” I’d said. Three months later I moved in with him into a shitty duplex apartment off Sunset Boulevard. It was lime green and looked like the scummy projects in the Mission in SF.  We had to turn up the TV loud to drown out the sound of our Russian neighbors hocking loogies morning and night.

When I walked outside to go to across the street to the gas station for water and gum, I smiled at them. They glared at me from their stoop with lavender hair and clashing animal prints.

Our shitty building was packed full of skinny, beautiful models who left their extra small g-strings in the laundry room. I’d gotten fat and resented them so I stole their panties in retaliation.

Sean and I fought and broke up a lot. Not like my Mom and step dad with broken glasses and black eyes and police. Sean blocked the doorway one night when I tried to leave, but I ran out and slammed the door behind me-that was my scream.

I got in my 1978 brown Chevy disco Nova that looked like it was lifted out of a swamp with the paint peeling off and windows that didn’t open or close. It had no air conditioner and no FM radio. Only AM so I listened to country and evangelical talk shows while I drove around the corner and into the parking lot of the Trader Joe’s where we survived on watery $4.17 turkey meat for months. We were scary broke.

I don’t remember what we fought about-maybe that, but I was on my knees and hopeless; frustrated and entitled and sad. I’d been a rich stripper in SF for over ten years, had a BA and was not used to being told, “No.” I couldn’t find a job and no one gave a shit about my degree or my year of counseling experience. I wanted a job in Los Angeles that wasn’t stripping or doing bachelor parties but all my job leads were dry.

After a sleepless night of fighting with Sean, I said with a terrible clarity, “Marry me or let me go while I’m still cute.”

“I can’t do this,” he said looking at the computer, with his back to me.

Outside the rain shot down like a horse pissing on a rock. I drove away and sat in a parking lot of a gym.  Go Home, I thought. Drive back to SF.  The phone rang. “Can you come in for an interview today?” I’d forgotten my friend Jen mentioned a receptionist gig at her law firm. “Yes.”

With somewhere to go, I got on the ten freeway. The rain beat down on the windows and my windshield wipers squeaked. The rain never let up. I missed stripping; standing before strangers naked, performing on stage and making over $700 a night. I had a handful of quarters and about two friends. I felt fat, invisible and ugly.

(AC) Sister Golden Hair by Sheila

I left my bed and the cat and plants and stayed with my friend Rose until I had to go back to the shitty apartment to pack my U-Haul.

Scrappy

“I didn’t know what else to do.” Sean said. “You were so unhappy here.”

I packed the U-haul with the same things I moved from SF, plus a cat and the plants and my bed. On the ride to Silverlake the cat howled like it was being murdered, and I sobbed like I had murdered the cat. Sleeping in my bed without Sean felt like waking up in a foreign country. Time and space slid around my feet and I held a big red ball of loss and tried to see the road ahead through tears, stumbled and fell, then found my footing again.

(1993-1995 San Francisco)

“I look at you, I am unable to stir, I struggle, I am unable to reach you monster.”

-Monique Wittig

I loved speed more than my dealer girlfriend.  If I describe Bianca she won’t sound beautiful: medium brown curly hair and pale Colorado skin. Sad grey eyes that pulled me home when I curled around her. “Ennui” tattoo on her freckled arm in typewriter script. She tasted like sweet water and dressed like a forties gentleman in a light green vintage buttoned up shirt and navy suspenders. Men’s shoes. Men’s socks. Sly smile. I contemplated suicide when she left my side to move quarters in brown Baggies around town. Not because I was afraid she’d get busted.

She was an outrageous flirt and I was a jealous bitch. I wanted the sun to melt us into lesbian porridge. I’d fantasize about living with her in a log cabin near a river where she’d smoke a pipe in a rocking chair and I’d wear fifties frocks and learn to knit. We’d slow dance to Etta James in the kitchen with the smell of sweet potato pie baking. That’s not what happened. Speed melted us together until we trickled into the gutter.

I wish I could call my uniform glamorous: ripped jeans and wife beaters. Oxblood Doc Martens. Fake eyelashes thick as furs and old lace slips from “Clothing by the Pound.” I was an “average student” by “community standards.” I had a job for a while, when I remembered to show up. I posed naked for artists for cash. Inside the Mission Cultural Center I wrapped myself around a chain from the ceiling for hours, sweating for a bump on my ten-minute breaks. I showed up late and pissed the instructors off, then got lost on my way back to Guerrero Street. The sharp edge of need scratched my brain while driving the wrong way down a one-way street. I couldn’t make rent and I didn’t give a shit.

Bianca and I bought our product from the same clan of fashionable bald fags in the Mission. They kept the drag queens supplied. Bianca served the lesbians. She also played guitar and sang like Kristen Hirsch. When she walked into the room my leg bounced nonstop. I got love spasms. My skin prickled with desire. I’d dated women but this was deeper than sex. This was fucking Speed. In our dealer’s apartment, she swaggered in all cool breezes with a copy of J.D Salinger’s “Nine Stories” in her back pocket. I sat in a zebra print chair with an anthology, “Angry Women” and two hairless cats. They wiggled their tales in my face like snakes.

I was having a love affair with ideas about women and power and sex.

The concept of “Woman” was something that was borrowed from a phallic legacy, denied place in the category of genius, and dismissed as a set of symptoms-as “Other” to man. My switchboard was lit by Avital Ronell’s feminine answering machine, responding to the call of the male metaphysical subject. Her crackling feminism was joyous, outrageous and libidinally charged. I bedded Cixious and her affirmation of hysteria: an inherently revolutionary hiccup in the binary logic of conformity. I got behind her agenda to break up continuities and respond to intolerable emergencies in life with her hysteria.

I fell for a feminism that encompassed biotechnics and all facets of technology, with a keen interest in exploring artifice, the simulacra and cyborgs. Bell Hooks seduced me with her language of rage. She shirked victimization and exposed the American Dream in her raw, angry prose. She evoked suffering and used it to resist domination and terror.

I toyed with Derrida’s reading of reading of photography and desire. It made me question my culture:“What are we allowed to view and what is being exposed?” There was a war on art, a war on drugs, a war on homeless people, gay people and a war on desire. What about sex? Sex was outside the law and taboo. Particularly queer sex. Whatever was taboo was hotly desired. This feminism that I longed for called for a remapping of all of my relationships, the interruption of all inherited, officially charted maps. It called into question the possibility of love.

Heather and Antonia by Jamie Griffiths

Bianca and I in the tiny Mission apartment, breathed in the cat piss and bleach smell of meth cooking. The fumes were glorious. We barely spoke. There were fresh fat lines to snort. We communicated in seismic waves and smoke signals: Two phone rings and a hang up meant “meet me in the parking garage.” We snorted thick chalky shards off glass paperweights and made out on the hood of her Kamann Ghia in the amber light and watched the sun drop through the windows onto the concrete floor. In her garage. I left her traces of my blood: post-it notes and mixed tapes. “It’s easy to love the beautiful,” she wrote. “Love people when they’re ugly.” I drove ugly to new depths. I became monstrous. Hysterical. Beyond the law. I rode the sharp edge between destruction and redemption. Anorexic and speed freak. Homeless and strolling hostess.

In the middle of the night, we hauled wooden chairs around town and repainted them ten times and reupholstered pillows with stolen fabric swatches. We never slept. Sharing meth with Bianca was like swimming underwater and spitting lava into our mouths. We held the night up by our arms and danced with black swollen pupils locked in a trance. Everyone else fell away. That was before the murderous voices.

Speed made me thin, euphoric and excitable. It kept me inspired and productive and tidy. It made me crafty with a staple gun. Falling and flying became the same thing. Bianca was my parachute. There was nothing accidental about speed. We rose and fell. One day became two. I had chronic diarrhea. I cut class. Friday became Wednesday and thirty pounds less later, I couldn’t hold food down, except oatmeal. This was not the humorous, ironic, joyous feminism I’d hoped for. This was death warmed over.

I no longer showed up for work or class. “People should pay you to hang out with you,” the bald dealer said. He meant I should try stripping, but I didn’t get that then. I’d hoped he meant he’d spot me free shit for looking fly in his chair. There was my Mom’s voice on my machine reminded me that I was fucked. She was coming to visit.

“You’re killing me. Cut up my credit card or I’ll never speak to you again.” Erase. Erase. I was supposed to use her credit card for emergencies only, while in school but I’d dropped out. I’d been using it to bankroll my habit and got busy strutting my stuff in a negligee and platform heels past the projects on fourteenth street at four a.m. looking for Bianca. There was no more Latin Women Writers class. Bianca left her girlfriend behind in an apartment with puke on the walls and bottles of Jack Daniels. They evacuated their house and we moved in together.

The Haight, 1995 by Farika

A year into my meth-fueled romance with Bianca, I’d found my calling at the Crazy Horse, a strip club owned by Ed, a surly forty something chain smoker who had the nerve to keep dancers on a schedule. The Crazy Horse was right next door to the Fillmore, so people emptied out onto to street and slid next door after concerts. The Crazy Horse was one of the few independently owned clubs that wasn’t a chain or run by the Persian Mafia and working there allowed me some extra freedom, not all of it financial.

My brown frizzy wig smelled like dust and old lady perfume. I’d gyrate on a couple laps, make enough dough to drink a couple glasses of red wine upstairs at the billiards club, then go back downstairs and leave with a couple hundred bucks. When I wasn’t at the Crazy Horse, I worked at “The Wasteland,” sorting clothes and arranging shoes. I was living with Bianca and working both jobs when Marya swaggered into “The Wasteland.” She was the Rhinestone Cowboy of dykes with black leather motorcycle pants, steel horns pierced through her chin and spurs on the heels of her black boots. She passed me her number on a torn piece of binder paper which I wrote on the beam upstairs in the break room at Wasteland with a black sharpie and called her from there on my lunch break.

“What are you doing later?” She asked. My heart sprinted out of my rib cage.

“Not much.”

“When are you off work?”

“I live with my girlfriend,” I said.

The next day, she came into “ The Wasteland” again. She bought me a six-dollar burrito and a huge orange soda in a white cup. I crossed and uncrossed my legs in a plastic chair that wobbled when I shifted.

“I’m one year sober,” she said with one hand on my knee. “I go to a meeting on Capp Street at ten o’clock. You could come after work.” I was snorting about a quarter every couple days. I’d soak the baggie in my morning coffee to get out of the house and on the train to the Haight. My nerves were raw and jangled. I knew I wouldn’t show up. The voices were getting louder. They’d said, “Take her by the neck and cut her throat.” They described what I was doing to myself.

“I’m really quitting this time,” I said.

“What?” A woman set her purse down on the metal table next to her keys. Marya was gone.

She said Tenderness Rests in the Hands

*an excerpt*

(1984, Humboldt)

I lost my virginity in a blackout in a summer cabin near a river. It wasn’t my family’s cabin. It was my neighbors. As long as I can remember, summer was a time to be bussed out to Camp St Michael and Bible camp where there were overnights, polar bears and charcoal man ghost stories. Bland powdered eggs and gluey oatmeal. Sharp clifts ending in swimming holes with the secret code initials L&K with a waterfall where I swam behind the stream in the open space with water falling in front of me and watched bodies splashing, beautifully out of focus. There were also summer camps for underprivileged kids but my family didn’t qualify. Somehow my Mom slipped me into the underprivileged mix and whispered, “Don’t tell anyone we have a bar in our house or that we own a boat.” What I remember about the underprivileged summer camp was that it was fun as fuck: less supervision and more peanut butter sandwiches on stale Wonder Bread, boxes of sugary stiff raisins and burrowing in a sleeping bag on a hillside in the rain under a bunch of pine trees.

What I remember about bible camp was my first kiss. His name was Greg. He was much older than me and we were playing flag football. I was a fast runner and strong. I could outrun most of the boys, but not Greg. I remember we were on the same team when he kissed me. I had to stand on my tiptoes to reach his mouth and my skin felt like it would burn off like charcoal man. After the kiss, we avoided each other and never spoke again. I gave him dirty looks. He ignored me. I walked my charred limbs to other boys after that.

By fourteen, I no longer required a babysitter and I’d found alcohol. I drank it in order to get gone. Usually the way it happened was a friend had a party and we all showed up and guzzled the parents stash. I drank until I puked for hours. Those summers were foggy and cold, but it got warmer an hour South of Eureka in Garberville, the notorious pot capital mecca that didn’t accept credit cards, only cash.

My neighbor best friend had the summer cabin in the hills of Garberville. The first time I went I must have been about seven years old. I was barfing from Kate’s Mom’s spaghetti, but I think I was just a homesick chicken shit. It was my first sleep over out of town and I missed my Mom. Kate had a big family with two older sisters who were Gods to me. They listened to top-forty music, had boyfriends, knew how to bake cookies from scratch and curl their hair like the girls in Seventeen magazine. They baby oiled their tanned curves and wore pink, grey and turquoise string bikinis. They did ballet. I wanted Kate’s sisters and her Mom who stayed home and cooked.  My Mom worked as a paralegal for two attorneys and she favored things that were dangerous to her, like horses and raging men. Never mind the things that were quiet and safe. I was born with a Mom-shaped loneliness inside me and it’s never gone away. When I put myself at risk, I feel closer to her, daring her to keep me safe. I am her daughter, after all.

Redway looked like a campground with sun and trees and other families with other kids met there every Summer to swim and goof off during summer vacation. I adopted myself into Kate’s family so I sometimes got invited to Redway.

In the car with Kate and her older sisters, we’d sing commercial jingles like “Don’t give me that so-so soda, the same old coca cola, I wanna rock and roll-a.” We’d go back and forth like that, first Shasta then Tab “For beautiful people.” I wanted to be a beautiful person, but I was bulimic and hated my body. I made myself barf two or three times per day by then, had red sores on the knuckles on my right hand from rubbing against my teeth. Now they’re little white scar-slivers where I picked the scabs and never let them heal. I was never going to be skinny, no matter how much jazzercise I did and I hated myself for that. But it wasn’t about the weight. Bulimia was about control, which I was always on the brink of losing.

So, I drank diet soda and gulped hard alcohol whenever I could get my hands on it. And alcohol was easy to find. There was a fully stocked bar downstairs in my house, where the neighborhood drunks would hang out and play liar’s dice with my Dad. After the divorce, my Mom and Chris had bottles in bulk so I had plenty to sample. I poured the gin or rum into a glass and added water to the bottle to fill the gap I left. I found friends to drink with but if I tell the truth, I didn’t need an accomplice to do this, I enjoyed drinking alone in the dark, keeping it secret and holing up in my room and watching TV or talking to boys on the phone.

I reigned in the barfing at Kate’s summer cabin because I was too embarrassed to do it in front of my friends, or have them hear me wretch. It was close quarters and I had little privacy, while at home I was left alone and there were several bathrooms where I could hide, run water and puke my heart out to no avail. No one was ever around.

Humboldt Road

With TV as my very best friend, I knew every commercial by heart. I was delighted to chew freshin-up gum that exploded in my mouth and knew every word to Blondie and Prince songs. Singing was like praying. Music was my mouthpiece, Maddona and Prince expressed my emotions for me. I was spawned by MTV, absolutely brainwashed by Madonna’s sloppy bawdiness and Catholic pageantry. I lived for Maddona and studied her songs like a fanatic. I gyrated to “Burning Up For Your Love,”  and stole gobs of plastic bracelets that covered my forearms. I was determined to have sex, but I’d only kissed boys. I wasn’t allowed to date until I was sixteen, but I had almost no adult supervision.

The summer I was fourteen, I was considered pretty in school and enjoyed attention from boys, but had no idea what to do with that. Kate and I went to private Catholic school together for the first seven years, then decided to go to public school for Junior High and High School and we didn’t have to wear uniforms anymore and there were boys to flirt with, boys who pinched my butt and gave me mean looks. Boys who kissed me then ran away.

There was a cute Italian boy whose family also had a summer cabin in Redway. Antonio Geraldi and he was an olive skinned dreamboat who made all of us laugh. I had a terrible crush on Antonio. He was tall and mature, seventeen years old with even teeth. We three girls planned a sleepover at Antonio’s place since his family hadn’t arrived yet. We drank his parents vodka and played music and danced around, I got shit faced with Kate and our other friend, Sandy and we got louder and ridiculous. I must have been a stupid, reckless girl drunk, singing my commercial jingles and dancing around, hating my body. The night is a big fat blur of red spray paint, like Madonna’s “Boderline” video. I remember beds outside where we slept. Iron bed frames and striped mattresses. Why were there beds outside and where were Antonio’s parents? I was wearing plaid preppy shorts and a sky blue Izod shirt.

“Is this okay?” he asked. Tongues, lips, no bra.

“Do you want to?” he asked. I remember the questions but not the answer. Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” played on repeat. It became one of those things I could never take back, so I swallowed it and let it fester there, forming a boil in my gut. His skin was olive and smooth. His hair was fine and the color of melted Rolos. When I woke up my head pounded. I felt a bump the size of a walnut on the back of my head where I must have hit it against the headboard. I looked down. There was blood dripping down my legs, running down my thighs and I had such headache. Antonio was next to me. I got up to find Kate and Sandy.

“What happened. Are you allright?” Sandy asked.

“I think we did it,” I said. “Please don’t tell Kate.” I was embarrassed, ashamed and covered in blood and my head pulsed. My plaid shorts were bloody. I went inside the bathroom and puked. I washed my shorts. I didn’t want Kate to think badly of me. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. I didn’t want to get in trouble, but it was too late, I was in trouble all right. I made that boy my boyfriend until he wasn’t.

1995