Valencia by Michelle Tea

Author:Michelle Tea [Tea, Michelle]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780786750849
Publisher: Seal Press

10

That was the year I puked on every winter holiday. If I was lucky, I had my head jammed down a toilet, innards convulsing. If I was unlucky, the stuff went elsewhere. Thanksgiving I was at Iggy’s house back when I first met her, when she was fresh to the city from Chicago. Iggy was a loud redhead who told stories so incredible you wondered if they were true but ultimately didn’t care because you were so enraptured by her grand gestures and re-enactments. And they were true. Iggy drank, and she cooked tremendous gourmet meals, and she smoked tons of cigarettes. I was glad that her place was a smoking household since me and Iris were a big smoking couple. Every morning Iris would rig up the espresso machine in her kitchen and froth us up these great soy milk coffee drinks, and about halfway through the glass, weighty pint glasses stolen from The Stud or The Uptown, we’d grab our smooshed blue packs of American Spirits and light up. I loved sitting on her back porch, on the peeling grey stairs that looked on to the weedy empty lot where homeless people slept on damp mattresses. A fat, magnificent palm tree grew in the middle, its top a burst of heavy leaves like an ancient jungle. I would sit and look at the tree and smoke and think about how great my life was. I leaned back against the rickety wooden crates packed with dirt and sunflowers, tangled vines with little yellow tomatoes you could pop in your mouth. Iris’s garden. She would come and sit beside me on the old wood, and the stereo from her room would leak out, Sonic Youth or PJ Harvey. PJ Harvey was ours. So tortured about what? Why were we tortured? We were in love and life was a fast current swarming around our ankles, threatening to topple us into the wet part of the planet. It was intense, that’s why we were tortured. It was enormous and exploding like that palm tree. Iris was my Yuri-G, my Delilah, my Stella Marie. Strong dark women you had to love with a strong dark heart that throbbed in gorgeous pain because love is terrible. I mean, ultimately. It would go away like a needle lifting from the vinyl at the end of the song, we knew this. The music would cease, one of us would die or else we’d just break up, and this drove us to drink from each other like two twelve-year-olds sneaking vodka from the liquor cabinet, trying to get it all down, trying to get as fucked up as possible before we got caught.

But back to Thanksgiving. Iggy cooked this huge fucking turkey, draped in warm apples and all that luscious grease, and you know I don’t eat meat, or I didn’t, hadn’t for years and I stared longingly at the bird as it was brought from the oven for basting. Iggy bravely endured the lesbian/turkey baster jokes from the boys, and I sucked in the stink of roasting flesh like a cigarette.

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