Didn’t I used to be a lesbian? Dreaming, Michelle wonders as she watched herself slip into a bathroom with a boy in a sideways baseball cap. Where did all these men come from? This one was young, twenty-two, though he had told her he was twenty-three, as if it made a difference. They were inside a brick building in the summertime on the East Coast of the United States of America. When Michelle looked out a window she could see dirty water, a greasy harbor, clouds gone pink in the sky. The light was golden and she took a picture of it with her cell phone. It looked like an oil painting. There was a long green bridge, and beyond that, a water tower sat upon a hill. That’s where I’m from, Michelle thought. Michelle felt a great swell of nostalgia for her life—it had been hard and strange to belong to such a place, but looking out at the piers rotting in the scummy water she knew it to be beautiful, the sort of beauty an ugly place will teach you to appreciate.
Michelle was dreaming of an art-party. The old brick building housed a gallery that was having an Unsuitable-themed costume party, though from what Michelle could see, no one had really bothered with a costume. Michelle had bought a pair of cheap white stretch pants at Target and created a very realistic blood stain on her ass, dripping deep red paint onto the crotch, truly striving to replicate the rorshach patterns of menstrual blood. She should know—every month her period caught her off guard, destroying underwear. She waited too long to change her tampons, left the house without them, rushed into drug stores in a tight-legged shuffle, trying to squeeze the blood back up inside her. At the party, everyone thought she’d really gotten her period and was bleeding all over herself. Not one person said a word to help her out. Thanks a lot, sisters, she scolded the lady artists gathered shame-faced around the Unsuitable snack table, where tropical punch bobbed with plastic tampon applicators and a giant rubber rat sat in the center of the cheese plate.
The twenty-two year old was named Reinaldo. He was an artist and a breakdancer. His breakdancer name was Fly. Michelle wondered if he was the verb, the noun, or the adjective, but she was too drunk to ask. Reinaldo had been sampling the tampon punch bowl, plus drinking cans of Mexican beer. His pinned and reddened eyes were evidence of having smoked a blunt before even arriving at the party. Like everyone else, Reinaldo had thought Michelle’s ass a sad catastrophe, missing the joke. He hung out with her anyway. He looks like James Franco, Michelle thought, getting dreamy. Or, like a young John Leguizamo. His hair beneath the baseball hat was a Medusa of curls, his cheekbones could peel the skin from an apple. He gave Michelle flyers for his own art show at a café in Chelsea. Now Michelle knew she was dreaming. Chelsea, the city that had birthed her, hazed her and chased her out, did not have cafés or art of any sort. Well, someone had bronzed the garbage lying around the city square, but that seemed more a cynical prank than art. What artists do you like? she asked him, and he blushed and shrugged, looking extra stoned. You know. Picasso, Dali . . . he said, trailing off. All those Spanish cats. And what’s his name. M.C. Escher. Oh, said Michelle.
