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wiped counters, and cut up blackcurrant scone samples. I popped one in my mouth. I needed to scratch together enough cash to get out of this cow town. I was feeling cramped and lonely. Maybe I needed to go to San Francisco where I could do what I want without being watched like a hawk by people who knew me my entire life. Ten bucks a day in coffee tips wasn’t cutting it. I called the orchid breeder’s number.
    â€œCan you model for me tomorrow for a few hours?”
    â€œHow much?” I asked.
    â€œFifteen an hour,” he said.
    I met him in a dusty attic loft in Old Town, with creaky redwood beams and orange light spilling through the windows. I was about twenty. The orchid breeder was thirty-six with a fixed, tense expression and frog-like eyes that never blinked. He smoked cigars and painted on a canvas with a couple of skinny branches that he dipped in muddy red paint.
    â€œHave you ever done acid?”
    â€œNope.”
    â€œHow is that possible? A fetching girl like you?” He opened and shut the freezer and handed me a tiny, white piece of paper, which dissolved on my tongue. We spent the next several hours touching and kissing. I got lost standing up. Time became syrup I couldn’t move through. My gut was empty. I loved every last minute of it.
    That was how the affair started. Not with mutual attraction or interests—the married man had the yummy drugs; he had the drug that made everything perfect, not just acid. He bought perfect powdered speed by the quarter baggy and fed it to me off his red kitchen counter; it made my soul swim. Crank was the answer to a question I didn’t know I had. It made me frantic and thin and euphoric. I snorted a line and soared skinless and weightless and looked down in a jagged disconnect. Did I mention speed made me skinny? Perfect.
    The orchid breeder was married to a woman named Kayla. What I knew about Kayla was that she was delicate, pretty, and blonde. And that she had been raped. I didn’t know what it meant to leave a wife, especially one who had been raped, but I’m sure Kayla still has a doll in my likeness with pins stuck through its eyes.
    One afternoon, the orchid breeder called. He was puffing on a cigar and asked, “Do you want to come to San Francisco?” Of course I did. This hick town was tightening around my neck. The alcohol and bars and acid trips were making me late for work. I was one write-up away from being fired. So I packed some clothes and books and climbed inside his U-Haul with his two dogs and my silver spray-painted bookshelves.

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    â€œS top moving,” he said. The orchid breeder must’ve painted my pussy seventy times. I shifted in the white lace doily he liked me to wear like a skirt. I kept rubbing my thighs because I had goose bumps. After these modeling sessions—in the cold motel room we were renting by the week—he would drive us around San Francisco in his baby-shit-brown Gremlin with bullet holes in the door while we looked for an apartment. But first, we found his dealer. Fritz was always on the corner of Haight and Fillmore. Fritz and the orchid breeder knew each other from college in Boston where they played in a Hawaiian Frank Sinatra cover band. Fritz was a balding guy with frizzy clownish curls who leaned forward so much it looked like he walked on his tiptoes. We bought two quarter baggies and then looked in the Bay Guardian for an apartment. After we’d been tweaking for two days, we settled on a warehouse space that used to be a Corn Nuts factory. We carried his hard, dusty futon into the one musty room and fucked while his eyes bulged like a goldfish. White, powdered speed filled our days and animated our nights. I lived on a diet of meth, hard, dry oatcakes and oranges. After we’d snort the drugs, we’d soak the baggies in our coffee, have line after line, and fuck; he painted wide strokes of labia, one hand pressed down on me like a stop sign. Then