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another line for dinner.
    In the orchid breeder’s paintings, I was a riddling sphinx, my face a box of shadows. His silkscreen paintings were pastel layers of pink and gray outlines of my thighs, face, and hands. They were muted layers around a blurry face and long, masculine fingers. The paintings were terrible, lousy, worse than lousy, but you can’t tell your boyfriend his paintings suck. He couldn’t capture me because I wasn’t there. I’d morphed into something else, tiny shards of fragments: an arrow, a train, watery edges of labia. I took myself away, fragment by fragment, until I was gone.
    A couple weeks after we moved into the Corn Nuts factory, we drove his car to the Mojave Desert. He fed me ecstasy on the way there, which meant he had to pull over a couple of times and let me barf. We walked in long shadows, sweaty and glistening, touching but not connecting in the heat.
    â€œYou have daddy issues,” he stared ahead, angry with me out of the blue.
    â€œLook at all of them,” I said. He clammed up. I planned my escape while the dust became bubbles inches in front of my face. I tried to bite them: daddy issues in translucent balloons. “They’re flying.”
    We walked in the shadows of the tall cacti. A stick shifted in the shade, which was actually a rattlesnake. It wiggled like a violent wave and shook its rattle. My knees were liquid. I fell back onto a rock as it curled its way away—the same way Mom collapsed the day Dad left.
    We camped in sand. A man shook his gun at us in the middle of the night. “Dad?” I bolted up.
    â€œThis is private property,” the man yelled.
    I followed the orchid breeder back to his car where we slept. The next day, his car wouldn’t start. It was over a hundred degrees. While we were stranded in the desert, his two dogs ran away. Soon after that, I ran away, too. I found a dinky basement apartment where I wouldn’t have to share my speed.

9
    E xodus was the only lesbian sex club in town, and my crotch tingled with the possibility of sex with a woman. I walked through the Mission in San Francisco in giant Olive Oyl platform shoes and leopard-print faux-fur shorts. Black halter. Bright red lipstick. Sometimes, I wore a less glamorous outfit: ripped jeans, wife beaters, and Oxblood Doc Martens. Fake eyelashes thick as furs and old lace slips ratted to shreds, but I was anti-glam grunge, a faded Xerox of the drag queens sashaying in my midst. I was on my way to score meth when I met Bianca.
    Bianca looked at me. She wasn’t an artsy film student who had an accident with a bottle of Manic Panic. She was a dapper girl-boy: tall and lean with fine brown hair and skin the color of Colorado snow. Her sad brown eyes pulled me home when I curled around her. “Ennui” was tattooed in Courier font on her freckled bicep. She tasted like Mountain Dew and was dressed like a forties gentleman in a light green vintage button 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 a 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.
    I still posed naked for live drawing classes 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 over my cash and never hired me again.
    I always got lost on the way to gigs, except when I rushed