Valencia

Praise for VALENCIA

“Wonderful storytelling . . . charged with reflection, anger, and the feeling of being alive.”

—
The Village Voice

“A spidery
roman á clef
for our times . . .

Valencia
crackles with take-no-prisoners prose.”

—
The Seattle Times

“[T]here is immediacy in the stream-of-consciousness style, as if Tea were in the room offering the reader a late-night confession.”

—
Library Journal

“An edgy, supercharged, supersurreal reality.”

—
Booklist

“What's truly inspired in this book is Tea's literary voice, an effortlessly controlled combination of ironic wit and romantic longing.”

—
The Bay Guardian

“The stream-of-consciousness narration is a delightful ride to be on, shifting us into other registers of memory and relationship.”

—Rain Taxi

“Tea's exquisite writing performs the miracle, dancing along a razor's edge between humor and pathos, jaded exhaustion and wonder. [I]n lesser hands, this material would simply be sad. As it is, it's transcendental.”

—
Girlfriends
magazine

VALENCIA

Copyright © 2000, 2008 by Michelle Tea

Seal Press

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

1700 Fourth Street

Berkeley, CA 94710

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form, except for the quotation of brief passages in reviews, without prior written permission from the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tea, Michelle.

  
Valencia / by Michelle Tea.

      
p. cm.

  
ISBN-13: 978-0-78675-084-9

 
1.
  
San Francisco (Calif.)—Fiction. 2.
  
Lesbians—Fiction.
  
I. Title.

PS3570.E15V35 2008

813'.54—dc22

2007046879
                

Cover and Interior Design by Domini Dragoone

Distributed by Publishers Group West

for Cari Campbell

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Acknowledgments

About the Author

introduction

What's more narcissistic than writing your own memoir? Writing an introduction to your own memoir. Welcome to it, people. Right before I began writing the stories that would become
Valencia
, I was coming down from an inspired poetry high that had allowed me to write one to five poems a day, all of them ruminations on my thoughts and my opinions and my experiences. I was twenty-three years old, had just moved to San Francisco, and these poems had allowed me to plug myself into the roiling early-'90s street poetry scene, a scene that overlapped neighborhoods, that erupted in crappy bars and coffee shops and art spaces, and that included anyone shameless and histrionic enough to clamber up to the stage and perform their life for the enjoyment of a bunch of romantic drunkards. I was psyched; I had
found my dream community, and all I had to do to be part of it was run my mouth about what and who pissed me off. Incredibly, no one told me to shut up. They
clapped
. The mixture of butch dykes, shy girls, ex-bikers, crackheaded misogynists, recent hillbillies, slumming academics, former communist party members, junkies, bike messengers, waitresses, Gothic club kids, sex workers, tattooed fags, Kathy Acker acolytes, Bukowski, Ginsberg and Rollins wannabes, hardcore punks, shabby bon vivants, and other intellectual miscreants was astounding. Writing was often the only thing we had in common, but our obsession with it was profound enough to keep us bound together like a real tribe, if one that occasionally split into violently warring factions.

The inspiration for the poetry came out of nowhere and raged in me like a mania. As it started to subside I found myself wanting to tell longer stories, and was a bit confused and worried about what to do next. The thought that I could lose this excellent life in San Francisco—a place I'd moved to knowing only a single person, with nothing but $1,500 I'd earned hooking, an army bag stuffed with really ugly clothes, and a hand drum—was the worst. I felt compelled to scribble some short stories based on real things that had happened to me: vignettes about my nutso ex-girlfriend, about when I was so in love I ran away to Tucson on a Greyhound bus, about how I did speed at the Dyke March and picked up that girl from Canada. But was that literature? In the house I grew up in literature was Stephen King, Jackie Collins, Jacqueline Susann, and
whichever horror paperback at the drugstore had the creepiest cover. A person didn't write about their own self and try to pass it off as
writing
; how egotistical!

Then I read Eileen Myles'
Chelsea Girls
, a collection of precisely such short stories, pieces that rang with detached but urgent truths and realities, written by a writer who handled the massive ups and downs of her past with coolness and style, never afraid to reveal harshness, seemingly oblivious to how she came off in the text, narrating herself like a god looking down at a fascinating life. It didn't hurt that the author was a dyke, or defiantly class-conscious, or that she hailed from the same slab of New England I'd recently escaped from. I'd found my literary soul mate. Reading
Chelsea Girls
was an electrifying experience.
I could do this
. I could write about my own life as if I were creating a character in a novel, letting my mind capture all the details it craved to capture, not giving a shit about how I or anyone else looked, just slamming a bunch of messy, crazy, fast life into my notebook. And I found that in the process of transforming my world, my life, my self into literature, my world, life, and self became elevated, seemed to occupy a space it hadn't previously, one more noble and romantic, the struggle of it all meaningful now, all past mishaps and future tragedies redeemed by this magical practice. Everything I touched turned to story, and it was golden.

And like the fairy tale, having everything turn to gold—or to story—has its downside, too. I think the weirdest side effect of
Valencia
, and the memoirs I wrote before and after, isn't people getting pissed at the way you represent them—oddly, most people were tickled to find themselves inside a book, barely fictionalized. Iris, Valencia's main squeeze, was nothing but awesome about my compulsive rendering of her, even when our breakup was totally old news, but I still couldn't stop pouting about it and bitchily icing her and her girlfriend. Her girlfriend, Emma, was also psychotically generous about the way I not only wrote about her, but
read
about her, all the time, at events she was likely to turn out at. After one such reading she left the art gallery, kicked a bus shelter and broke her foot. Because I was a small-hearted, bad person, I delighted in this. Years later, reading an Emma excerpt from
Valencia
at a seven deadly sins-themed event (my sin was jealousy), I was horrified to learn she was in attendance. I'd prefaced the excerpt by telling the audience what a jerk she was, how she stole my girlfriend, blah, blah blah. This had all happened years ago, but because it had been cemented into narrative by this book, the character of Evil Emma lived on, forever trashing my love life. Except she was a real girl, there in the audience. I felt like the most stunted asshole ever, performing my ancient resentments. I apologized to her afterwards, and as always she was gracious, but my
Sorry
felt weak in comparison to the years of literary torment I'd subjected her to.

That's the strangest part of turning your life into a story—not the social fallout, the way you over-expose yourself, the way others will inevitably think you're a narcissistic egomaniac who can't get
enough of herself. The hardest part is how writing it down petrifies your experience, freezes it in time. You have to believe the story is true to put it on paper, at least I do. But for normal, healthy non-writer people, the way you view your life ideally shifts with time and perspective. If you've rolled your history into a book, and then performed that book over and over, it can be hard for distance to set in and nuance the past. And when it eventually does, it feels confusing, embarrassing, and humbling.
Valencia
is a bug trapped in emotional amber. It's a snapshot, more or less, of my twenty-fifth year on earth, written not how it happened but how I
felt
it happened, and how I felt about it happening. I could not have written it without the inspiration and guidance unknowingly provided by Eileen Myles, who continues to be a mentor and favorite writer. And it could not have been written without Emma, who was a catalyst for drama the way we all are for each other, like it or not. Our lives make awesome stories, especially if you don't get too attached to the thread of your own narrative.

Michelle Tea

On a Plane Above the U.S.

September 2007

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