Valencia (24 page)

18

Scrumptious stood on the corner in a vinyl outfit that spread black like an oil slick across her body. It wasn't hers. None of it was hers, not the clothes, not the hair—a wig—and not the leather jacket. That leather jacket was Iris's, those stickers peeling on the back, the thick, crinkled arm I'd hung on for months. Who was this girl wearing my ex-girlfriend's leather jacket? She was Scrumptious, but not yet. Her real name was Stella, she didn't become Scrumptious until later when we were all so high. Stella drove to San Francisco alone, on her motorcycle. All the way from Canada. She was supposed to stay at this notorious pervert house that had a red basement hung with rubber slings and photos of girls with carved skin on the walls. But the place was already packed with perverts, so she was shunted to
Iris's house, to sleep on the pull-out couch. That's My Ex-Girlfriend's Jacket, I said, filled with dread at the thought of looking at it all night. It was the night of the Dyke March, that's why Stella was so done up, the brilliant silver wig that bobbed in synthetic swirls at her shoulders, the slick second skin of vinyl. She looked like she wanted to get laid, and I guessed that she would have no problem on that most bacchanalian of nights, when girls grow fangs, and hair sprouts on their chests, and no one goes to bed before six. I wasn't planning on going to bed at all. I had a bag of crystal in my wallet and my heart was still smashed. This time last year I'd had Iris on my arm, licking her mouth in the street. Now she had the other girl, and I would spend the night in fear of bumping into them. I couldn't wait to do the drug. I had done it once before and wanted that feeling inside me again, like needing to hear your favorite song, an external experience made internal, made intensely personal. Blood zinging through your body like pinball and you own it, the king of your own glowing kingdom.

Right away I saw Iris. I was at a little convenience store that was so packed they were only letting people in two at a time. I had a Coke to dump my whiskey into plus a granola bar for dinner and there she was, with her annoying girlfriend. They actually looked alike, physically. It freaked me out. Hi, I said quickly, and scooted away with my food. I was sure they were laughing at me, both of them in their creepy matching faces. I dumped some Coke into the gutter to make room for the whiskey. Standing amongst ten thousand
lesbians I was suddenly a lot more conscious of littering. Girls were winding slowly through the streets, not so much marching as plodding. Thank god no one was chanting. Let me tell you right here that it is just so sad what a year can do to you. What a girl can do to you. It had just about ripped the life right out of me. I smoked cigarettes and walked through the Castro with Stella, the tower of glamour, and with Magdalena, who carried an enormous bouquet of daisies, cradling the thick green cluster. When she saw a girl she thought was cute she'd tug a single stem free of the bunch and hand it to her. She had the white and yellow blossoms pinned in her hair like little smiles. Everyone with a camera was snapping pictures of Stella and Magdalena. I hung off to the side in my unremarkable outfit, keeping an eye out for my Iris and her shiny paramour. I'd spent the past few weeks beginning bunches of little affairs and then bailing, and those girls were all milling about as well, a tiny army of girls I needed to avoid. I was feeling slightly under siege and was thinking maybe it might be time to leave San Francisco. Let's Do Drugs, I hissed at Candice, who had gone in on the bag with me. Let's Go. We rounded up some kids and tried to find a good place to debauch. Laurel was there. We're Going To Do Speed, I told her. Speed has such a bad reputation. You can't play around with it without everyone thinking you're on the skids.
I cannot be around that
, Laurel said.
I hate speed energy
. She had her hand held out like,
talk to the hand
. People are terrified of the thought of me on speed, but the truth is it makes me feel strangely calm,
like I've bundled the whole world up to nurse at my breast, grand and serene, all my daily manic energy concentrated into a fine point that sits in my belly and I am god. Oh, Laurel, I'm Fun On Speed, I protested, but she was not having it. And now my speed partners were tense because I had implicated them, and now everyone would think they had drug problems, but I just cannot be discreet about drugs. We walked up one of the shadowy streets stretching up from Market and huddled together on the steps of a Victorian. I pulled the goodies from my wallet.
Did you cut it?
someone asked. Uh . . . No, I said. I didn't know I was supposed to. I dumped some of the crumbled white stuff onto my ID and tried to chop it into a fine dust with my ATM card.
You're losing it!
someone gasped as tiny crystals pinged off the card into the darkness. Well, You Do It Then. Someone more worldly than me took the drugs and went to work, while the rest of us watched fearfully for cops or the residents of the Victorian.
Can I have some?
Stella asked.
I'll give you money
. Stella took a tightly rolled bill and lifted it to her nose. She was really something, her fake hair glittered as dazzling as the crystal she breathed into her nostril. She tipped her head back and sniffed, silver hair cascading down her neck. The drug shone pretty like snow and I was anxious for my turn. Stella was going to ride her motorcycle in the parade the next day and she didn't have anyone to sit on the back. I Will, I said and dipped my nose to the drug, sniffing hard. It seared a chemical path through my sinuses and dripped bitter and gritty down the back of my throat. I drank some
whiskeycoke.
Yeah, you should ride with me
. The more you talked to Stella, the more you could see how that outfit wasn't hers. She looked great in it, but it was a costume.
This S/M woman in Vancouver let me borrow it
, she said.
I don't dress like this at all
. She laughed. What did she normally look like? Who was she? I felt the pleasant rush of speed like an excellent tide, and instantly I was fascinated with Stella. Her eyes flickered at me like the tongue of a cat and I forgot about all the girls out to get me. Around the corner was the steady roar of every dyke in the world. We gathered our stuff and joined them, then met up with more friends who also wanted to do drugs. We searched out another hiding place, the vaguely wooded area behind the Harvey Milk school. There were a few trees, cement stairs we sat on as I busted the stuff out like a big dealer, chop chop. I did a little more. Tommy swallowed some Ecstasy and Stella said,
Can I have some? I'll give you money
. We sat in the relative hush of our scrawny forest and chattered our speed chatter, squatted to pee against the skinny urban trees.

When did this big lightning bolt happen with Stella? Dancing by the DJ booth they erected in the middle of the Castro, in the street there, Prince, “Erotic City.” Stella yanked me into the sweating throng of dancing girls and started dancing at me in that sexy way I hate, all grindy, with the strategically placed knees, but for some reason—the drugs, certainly—I was able to do it. I gripped Stella's squeaky vinyl hips and churned her on my knee, straddled hers, and on the sidelines my excitable friends jabbed and poked
at each other. Me and Stella stared deeply into each other's dilated eyes and gyrated. I hoped Iris was seeing this. It was so sick that Stella was wearing her jacket. The speed offered me terrific powers of concentration as I maneuvered my legs beneath her. Right before we kissed, my eyes snagged on this girl I'd had sex with recently, a girl whose calls to my home were going unanswered. I'd be checking voice mail and there it was, this unfamiliar, girlish voice streaming out from the receiver. I'd feel something, it was panic's little sister. I'd jam my finger on a button like squashing a bug.
Message erased
. The feeling evaporated like sweat from my skin. Now this girl was at the edge of the dance floor, glaring. I snapped my eyes shut and dove into Stella's mouth. It was like falling into a warm bath, or a swimming pool if you're sweaty. God, speed is so great. I was in love with Stella. She was magnificent, so tall and strong and wrapped in that plastic outfit. She was like a bendable figure you'd pick up in the toy aisle at Walgreens, some glamorous girl warrior. What would the night give us?

We walked to a party, a short walk, and crashed into a living room crowded with topless girls dancing to Depeche Mode. One with a little pierced-up face grabbed us and barked,
Take off your shirts, take off your shirts
, pulling on the fabric. I peeled off my tiny Boston Red Sox t-shirt and stuffed it in my back pocket, starting to dance with Stella. She was probably Scrumptious by now. Tommy called her that, and it really stuck. That party was being thrown by this really sex-positive S/M dyke who was always trying to get an
orgy going at other people's parties. I grabbed her as she moved into the kitchen. Hey, Can I Have Sex In Your Room?
Sure love, with who?
She was British. I pointed to Scrumptious, dancing nasty between a new set of thighs, and the British girl went and threw down this really impressive spread in her room, gloves, a bucket of lube, shiny square packets of condoms, a holiday. Scrumptious came into the room, grabbed me and looked very deeply into my eyes.
Do you believe in destiny?
she asked, and flung me on the bed. It was hell getting those vinyl pants down. Stella's wig was gone now, one of the topless girls in the other room had ripped it off her head. She was bald beneath it, just a tiny fuzz of blonde, her makeup stark on her face without the halo of hair to soften it. Stella talked a lot during sex, and I was glad. I was on all that speed, and I didn't want to have to stop talking just because the night had taken this turn. My enormous jeans, barely held up by my belt, fell easily to the floor.
Do you like this?
Scrumptious asked.
Do you like that?
Before I could answer or even consider it, she'd zoom off to some other part of my body. Everything was frantic and crazy and she kept, I don't know, telling jokes or something because we were both cracking up and talking and people kept coming into the room to get their coats from the foot of the bed. Tommy walked in and grabbed my jeans from the floor, picked my wallet from the pocket. Don't Do It All! I hollered as she walked with it into the bathroom.

Stella left to get some water and came back with a third girl and we had sex with her too. We were like a pair of deranged
lawnmowers. The third girl had this gnarly belt, metal rings looped together with bits of leather, and she was kind of going to town on my ass with it, and I could barely feel it with the many chemicals coursing through me. I liked the sound it made, though, a fleshy
whap
. My body was like a ball of light, it was supernatural. My friends were banging on the door,
Come on, let's go, we want to go
. We Should Go, I said to Scrumptious, Before They Do All The Drugs.
You guys are on drugs?
asked girl number three, weaving her belt back into her jeans. Out in the living room shirts were still off, and the British girl was on the couch, an arc of glinting pins pushed through the skin around her breasts. Tiny creeks of blood dribbled out the holes and pooled in her bellybutton.
Bye, love!
she shouted as we left her apartment.
Be safe!

Ok, so the plan was to not sleep, to stay up until the sun rose and make first call at this shitty boy bar in the Castro. By four o'clock I think we started to realize what a really meritless idea that was, but no one wanted to back out, and no one was capable of sleep, so we trudged on. To another party. A rave thing, right, so we figured, great, everyone would be as wired as we were, all drenched in awful synthetic noise. When we got there, it was liquid calm, an opium den with kids decomposing on pillows, looking up at the herd of panting elephants busting into their mellow. Another girl I had slept with recently and then needed to never talk to again was there, on
Ecstasy. I ran back down the stairs and hid in a doorway until my friends got nervous and came looking for me. The only place we could think to go was Club Universe. An awful all-boy techno club with that terrible, repetitive headache music, thousands of fags with no shirts bumping into you with sweaty, steroid torsos.
It costs like a million dollars to get in
, someone protested, and I said, Don't Worry. Deep in the dark alleys South of Market you could hear the club's loud thumping for blocks, a dull bass beat pulsing through the pavement. We paused on a deserted corner and dipped the tip of a house key into the tiny pouch of speed, held the metal to our nostrils. We had acquired a youngish, sort of nervous girl at one of the parties, she was just there for the ride. We were like those guys from the
Wizard of Oz
, people could tell we were going nowhere fast and they wanted to come. She wanted some of the drugs.
Can I have some?
she asked, tentative, then,
No no I can't I can't. What if I just did a little?
I Guess You'd Get A Little Speedy. When we were done she took the key and licked the fine dust from its crevice.
I had to try it!
she gushed. We approached the mammoth dance club. It was something like fifteen bucks to get in. I tried Club Courtesy on the door girl, to get us in.
Do you have a laminate?
She was jaded and bored. Um No. I told her all about the little open mic for girls I hosted, a noble thing, maybe she'd let us right in, but the female minion of this throbbing cash cow was not impressed. Well I'm Also With The Film Festival, I said, whipping out a laminated card with my dopily smiling face on it.
That's nice
. Listen, I
commanded, pulling out my ammo. I Write For The
San Francisco Bay Times
, I'm Writing A Piece On Enormous, Alienating Dance Clubs And I'd Like To Get In As Press. This had actually worked for me in the past. I could see her hesitate, mesmerized temporarily by the Svengali of Media.
Do you have a press pass?
she asked, snapping back into door-cop. No, But I'm On The Masthead.
Do you have the masthead?
Well, No, I Don't Carry The Goddamn Paper Around With Me! Behind me my friends shuffled awkwardly and twitched. Listen, How Many Dykes Are Inside There? I demanded of the door cow. None, Right? Maybe Like Two Dykes Are In There, But That's It, Because Your Cover Is So Fucking Expensive We Can't Afford To Come In! It's Classist! There's A Bunch Of Gay Boys With Too Much Money, Two Dykes, And That's It! There's No Diversity! It's Goddamn Dyke Night And None Of Us Can Afford To Come Into Your Club! She looked at me, boredom sitting on her face like age.
Hold on
, she said. She went away, whispered to the guy in the hallway.
You can get in for five
, she said,
and that's it
. I turned to my people, they looked pained. What Else Are We Going To Do? I said helplessly. We dug into our wallets. In my haste I yanked out the speed, the bag fell to the floor with a splat.
Michelle
, hissed Candice. Oops.