Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger

II. Enemies Within

i II. Enemies Within Workers of all countries unite in peacetime, but in war—slit one another’s throats! —Rosa Luxemburg This page intentionally left blank  10. I courted her with pints of chocolate Häagen-Dazs and lines from Calderón de la Barca, “¿Qué es la vida? / Un frenesí. ¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión/ Una sombra, una ficción...” What is life? A frenzy. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a lie. I took her to Kathryn’s where we gave a command performance as The Sextets. Once, I recited the litany of all the places I’d stayed after the shaving performance when the Colombians kicked me out of the Rego Park apartment. There was the house in Long Island packed with South Asians that I came to by way of a Filipina woman from Performance Studies. Then there was the housesitting gig in Flatbush where a bunch of young black men surrounded me on the train once, asking “Happy about Bensonhurst , you racist skinhead?” Until one guy finally said, “It’s just her ’do, man, like that singer,” and they moved off, reluctantly. Then the sublet in Park Slope. Then a retreat to Cincinnati. Then back for a studio on SoHo’s Grand Street. And a room in Astoria with a Basque–Puerto Rican dyke who taught me how to make pasta. Then a share in Harlem, with a heterosexual Bengali poet who dated an ex-boxer, drank nothing but scotch, and made me dinner in exchange for the Marlboros I got as a perk for temping at Philip Morris where I fortuitously met Marie. Then an illegal hostel in a West Village brownstone run by a Dubliner dyke, before Ireland itself, where for a month I was the first out dyke everybody’s parents met. Then an all-Hispanic building in Williamsburg infested with rats so big they only left paw prints on the glue traps. Finally Avenue B.  eating fire I still thought it was an adventure, all those worlds I passed through, my around-the-world trip in 690 days. Though maybe when I told her those stories I was hedging my bets again, offering a warning that I was a rolling stone, wouldn’t last. Ana’s friends, too, were skeptical. Maybe because I was quite a bit younger than her. And had no roots. Ana herself told me, “I keep waiting for a shoe to drop. First one, then the other.” But the relationship took, like an unexpected graft. Ana even stayed sometimes in the loft, pushing Audre Lorde and H.D. and Artaud off my mattress to sweat in solidarity, though her bedroom eight blocks away was cold with air conditioning and complete with a real bed, real walls, a door, and a son in the room across the hall who departed from the story as quickly as possible. There was an ailanthus in the backyard. You could hear it rustling in the wind like a jungle creature. When it rained, the heavy green leaves pressed up against the window. I discovered bright red lipstick in Ana’s medicine cabinet. We talked sprawled out on her living room floor because there was no couch until I demanded it years later, and if you didn’t want tetanus you’d avoid the chairs around the table that were made of skins and twigs and rusty nails. There wasn’t much besides that but a piano in a niche, tons of plants, a few paintings. The empty space was handy for rehearsals, she said. And meetings. Delivery guys asked if it was a dance studio. And we would sometimes turn on the music and fling ourselves around the room. I did a mean rendition of Isadora Duncan trapped by her own scarf. We told each other all our stories. I’d still go off on my mom, who was occasionally joyful but mostly ranted and raved, all strung out on Jesus and tranqs and gallons of Maxwell House Instant brewed in the dangerous cup. Then it was my multiply married sisters, and my father who was barely there, working out of town when we were kids, and after the divorce was such a schmuck about that tumor thing. But I also told her about that summer after college that enemies within  Heather and I went up to her mother’s farm in northern Kentucky and had to...