I’m Really Quitting This Time

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_13/Crane.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″]

(1993-1994 San Francisco)

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

Bianca was a dapper girl-boy: tall and lean with fine brown hair and Colorado snow skin. Sad grey eyes that pulled me home when I curled around her. “Ennui” tattoo in courier font on her freckled bicep. She tasted like Mountain Dew 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 quarter Baggies around town. Not because I was worried she’d get busted for dealing but because she was an outrageous flirt and I was a jealous bitch. I wanted the speed to melt us into drippy lesbian porridge. I fantasized 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 into dirty sludge that trickled into San Francisco gutters.

I wish I could say my uniform was glamorous: ripped jeans and wife beaters. Oxblood Doc Martens. Fake eyelashes thick as furs and old lace slips ratted to shreds, but we were anti glam grunge, a faded Xerox of the drag queens glistening in my midst. I posed naked for live drawing classes for untaxed cash at the Mission Cultural Center where I wrapped myself around a chain from the ceiling for hours, sweating for a bump on my ten-minute breaks. “You have a reputation for being late,” I was told by pissed off instructors. They handed me cash and never hired me again.

I was late. I always got lost on the way to gigs, except when I rushed to Guerrero Street, back to Bianca. The sharp edge of longing scratched my brain while I drove the wrong way down a one-way street. I couldn’t make rent and I didn’t give a shit, but I always found Bianca.

We bought our product from the same clan of fashionable bald fags on Sixteenth Street the Mission. They kept the drag queens supplied. Bianca served the lesbians. She also played guitar and sang like Kristen Hersh. She walked into the room and 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 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 the “Angry Women” anthology 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, dismissed as a set of symptoms-as “Other” to man.  My psychosexual 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 and Christian law. I got behind her agenda to break up continuities and respond to intolerable emergencies with hysteria. I fell for a feminism that encompassed biotechnics and platform Mary Janes, all facets of technology, with a keen interest in exploring artifice, the simulacra, cyborgs and vintage lingerie. I was becoming more robotic every day, marinating in the juices of crystal meth. bell hooks seduced me with her language of rage. She shirked victimization and exposed the American Dream in her raw, angry poetry. Terror was the buy message. There was a war on art, drugs, queers, desire and HIV. There was a war on femininity, war on feminine sex and a war on queer sex. The feminism I desired called for a remapping of all of my relationships, the disruption of all officially charted maps. It called into question the possibility of love and lit the match of my lesbian body. The problem was my lesbian body was disintegrating up  a long plastic straw along with my septum.

Bianca and I breathed in the cat piss and bleach smell of meth cooking in the tiny apartment. The fumes were glorious. We barely spoke. There were fresh fat lines to snort instead. We communicated in seismic waves and smoke signals: Two phone rings meant  “meet me in the parking garage.” We stood there in the amber light and snorted thick chalky shards off glass paperweights and made out on the hood of her Kharmann Gia. We watched the faded sun slip through the windows from the concrete floor. In her garage, I left 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 jagged edge between destruction/redemption, anorexic/speed freak and homeless bum/strolling hostess/bisexual/dyke/addict.

In the Mission, Bianca and I hauled wooden chairs around town and repainted them ten times and reupholstered pillows with stolen fabric swatches. Sharing meth with Bianca was like swimming underwater and spitting lava into her mouth. We held the night up by our arms as the hours collected lint in our pockets; black swollen pupils big as walnuts, locked in a trance. Everyone else fell away like the burnt sun.

Speed was becoming. 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 crashed. One day became three. I had chronic diarreah. I cut class. Friday became Wednesday and thirty pounds less showed bones in my chest. This was not the humorous, ironic, joyous feminism I’d chased. It wasn’t Lacan’s jouissance. This wasn’t Foucault. This was a living death, memory loss, hair loss.  I forgot school, forgot work, forgot home. Forgot you. Forgot myself.

“People should pay you to hang out with you,” my dealer said.  He meant I should try stripping, but I didn’t get that yet. I heard he’d spot me free shit for looking good in his white fur chair. My mom’s worried voice on my answering machine became my only thread to the outside world. “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. I had been using it to bankroll my habit. In a negligee and platform PVC boots, I walked  the projects in the Mission at four a.m. looking for Bianca instead of attending my Latin Women Writers Class.

“I’m really quitting this time,” I said. Bianca snorted a line off a plastic CD cover and one huge tear fell from her frozen marble eyes. I heard echoes of my mom’s voice on my answering machine. “I’m coming next week, she’d said.  My mom, Demeter, found me, Persephone in my filthy apartment.

“I have to leave for a while,” I said.

“If you go, I’m gone, that’s it,” mom said.

“Just for a while.” I needed a bump. The voices were louder. I’d have to cut off my ear.

“I won’t be back. Ever,” she said. I popped a couple Xanax. In the mirror, I saw her red nose, her grey pools for eyes. When her mouth moved, I heard:

“Take her by the neck and cut her throat.” I scanned the room for my knives. I kept them under my haunted TV.

“Here’s your credit card.” I handed her the plastic pieces. Would she kill me over this?

“You have to pay me back. This was not a loan.” I’d moved my knives. I checked under the bed.

“I have to go out for a little while,” I said.

“I heard: Kill her. Snap her neck.” She wouldn’t say that. I needed more speed. I needed more Xanax. She was an orange circle, a toothy goblin.

“Just for a while,” I said.

In the mirror, my skull protruded. Cheekbones. Rib cage. Pointy nose. Collar bone. Same blue grey eyes as hers. Twin marbles. Thin at last.

I pulled on a white t-shirt, crawled into bed with her and waited.

“You should eat,” she said.

“Please be quiet.”

“You’re about to lose your teeth. You had such nice teeth.”