Kielbasa Two Ways
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Greetings from the air. Isn’t it wild that humans can fly? Way up high, in the sky? Even as I sit right here, doing it, it’s sort of unfathomable that humans figured this out. People with, architecturally speaking, essentially the same brain as me. I often think about that really offensive Camille Paglia quote, that if women ran things we’d all still be living in grass huts etc. etc. - I think I am one of the women she is speaking of. Often I am so grateful for being born at this point in time, because in none other would I have been able to earn my keep on the planet. I cannot build, or make. I can read tarot cards and spin yarns. When I drank I was able to sort of conjure a terrific energy, like a Tesla coil, and I actually thought that that was enough, and maybe it was, maybe it just depends who you’re hanging out with during the apocalypse. As much as I am routinely relieved to not have to weave baskets or make soap, so do I occasionally worry that an impending apocalypse will problematize my lack of useful skills. Years ago I dread-watched most all The Walking Dead, just imagining what would become of me should such a thing come to pass. I’d like to think I could master a Carol-style transformation from suburban mom to bow-wielding assassin/farmer/war strategist, but this is just fantasy. I would wind up meat, like in that chilling Terminus episode I occasionally enjoy remembering just to freak myself out.
Anyways, up here in the plane I have reached peak grossness. I’m too scaly to apply any of the lotions packed in my bag; like a flash flood on parched land the ooze would just sit there. I’m all bloated and farty the way one gets on planes, especially when one accepts the snacks proffered, the Cheese-Its and well-meaning “seed bars” and also the Spicy Sweet Chili Doritos and the freaking Milky-Way I bought at the magazine store. I always buy chocolate for a plane because if I’m maybe going to die I want to eat chocolate, and this was also the rationale for the Doritos, a sort of deny yourself nothing philosophy, so junk food makes sense but why a Milky Way? Perhaps my past week in Pittsburgh, among the ruins, feeling lodged in some former version of America, made the weird pillowy candy seem like a good idea. It wasn’t. Only hours ago, at Logan airport in Boston – we used free JetBlue miles for this trip, awarded when they fucked up our spring break trip last year, and so had to accept that the only way to Pittsburgh from Los Angeles is, yes, through Boston – only hours ago I was smugly eating fucking tofu bibimbap, feeling so good about myself for making a smart choice, and now I’ve just let it all go to hell and feel like one of those abandoned brick buildings we passed all week, with wooden boards half-torn from the windows and soggy cushions piled on the front porch.
I hope I am not misunderstood by the public, as I once was, and anger any loyal Pittsburghians by talking about how intense it was to spend the week in a city with 30,500 abandoned houses, all of them looking like the neighborhood from Barbarian. Let me say right away that I love urban blight, as I was raised in a blighted city and, being a naturally romantic person, projected my idea of romance all over the crumbling town, much like the old romantics did to the Medieval architecture in their midst, thereby creating Goth, and am I not goth? Is not Chelsea, Massachusetts an Urban New England Goth and is not Pittsburgh an intense, Industrial High Goth? Of course it is. My husband possesses a similar psyche, and the investigation of abandoned places and cemeteries is his primary leisure activity and so he was so happy in Pittsburgh. And he has recruited the child into this pastime, taking him to our neighborhood abandoned houses and once all the way out to a heavily graffitied abandoned water park that has been reclaimed by the desert. So, we were all really happy in Pittsburgh, where we circled an abandoned Catholic Church looking for a way in and half scared we’d find one. The doors of the church are now enormous wooden boards, heavily spray-painted and flanked by columns of perfect, unspoiled pink marble. A plaque proclaiming the spot an historical monument was not enough to keep the blight at bay. The graffiti is funny – repetitions of poorly executed Led Zeppelin logos, like some kid was trying to get it right, again and again, but fifty years ago, because – Led Zeppelin???
We moved away from the church and over to another building, maybe a school, it seemed attached to the church but too big to be a rectory or convent – I know these things. Get me to a place like Pittsburgh and I’m suddenly SO CATHOLIC, delighting at all the little signs for Lenten fish fries stuck on the side of the road – SO POLISH, too, abandoning my values and eating kielbasa not once, but twice – once in a side of Pittsburgh hash at Pamela’s (Lyonnaise potatoes topped with swiss cheese, sauerkraut and kielbasa) and again at Primanti Bros., where I had kielbasa on slices of cloudlike bread, in the maniacal manner this joint makes a sandwich – lettuce, tomato, vinegary cole-slaw, and French fries. Pittsburgh famously puts French fries on their salads. My joke was that we were on the Guy Fieri Tour of Pittsburgh – a joke that wound up being frighteningly true when we went for eggs and grits at Kelly O’s (world famous!) and found the entire hallway an homage to the bottle blonde food celeb, his sunglasses twirled backwards on his head, in a flaming button-up. Kelly O’s was featured on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, and every place we ate last week aspired toward that show, that was our dining theme. Diners made sense because a.) they’re cheap b.) they serve food a picky 8-year-old will eat c.) my husband is exactly the person who will (who did!) order the hamburger in a donut ‘bun’ at the rather sad nostalgia restaurant owned by a plucky mom who literally had put her two children to work slinging cheese fries and sweeping the floor (incidentally, I got ‘wing dust’ on my cheese fries and that was super yummy. I am partial to food joints with ‘dust’ on the menu, and this place had a few). Finally, diners felt right for Pittsburgh because Pittsburgh is a diner city. A rough, working-class, half-abandoned place, and while I did see signs of foody life, I elected to bring us for BBQ in a converted gas station that smelled like dirty punks.
Anyways, the abandoned school or whatever it was did have a window we could have hopped through, but it was too scary. TJ kept hearing a noise, and while the child insisted it was just water dripping, the corner of the room was so dark it looked like a black hole sucking light from the universe, the literal void, and cold enough to preserve any bodies which may have been dumped there in the last fifty years. I am actually a fairly uptight parent and there is no way in hell I was going to let the daredevil child with the Aries rising into this possible maw of hell.
Instead we drove out to see the shell of the atom smasher Westinghouse had used to experiment with nuclear energy back in first half of the last century. It lies on its side, silver and enormous, light-bulb shaped, kept from rolling around by the debris of the ripped-down Westinghouse building surrounding it. After the thing was decommissioned it lived on the roof of the Westinghouse building like a bulbous silver mascot. I thought, surely it can’t be radioactive? Right? I mean, it’s just lying here, behind a fence that has been cut into and is fully accessible from the residential road it lies on. A row of houses – not abandoned – face this thing, they wake to it every day. It sat atop the roof, for goodness sake, it could not be radioactive, right? The child, of course, slipped easily behind the fence and wanted desperately to run over to the atomic icon and just, like, touch it – we’d hardly let him injure himself on this trip at all, and he was frustrated. He was so tremendously woebegone at our refusal to let him slide under the revolving door and into the abandoned Heinz factory (the whole reason for this trip, on the child’s spring break, is his obsession with Heinz ketchup and its creator, Henry J Heinz), and we would not allow him to climb the fence in the one spot where there was no barbed wire, we were the worst, so could he please at least run over and smack the atom smacker and run right back? The things that give kids a thrill are strange but I’m a connoisseur of my own strange thrills so it’s not like I don’t get it. Maybe I was being too nervous a nelly. I googled if the thing in this weedy, brick-strewn lot was, like, atomic, and guess what? The whole fourth floor of the Westinghouse building was discovered to have low levels of radiation in the 1990s – a full forty years after they’d ceased doing anything nuclear! No, the child could not touch the atomic relic, and could we all please get the fuck out of this particular part of Pittsburgh before we get cancer? And we did. We went off to a cemetery so the child could place a ketchup packet at the grave of Henry J Heinz. His mausoleum was very spiffy, lots of sparkling quartz in the rock. Some folks had hung cheap strings of rosaries on the wrought iron door, and there was a single purple flower, fake, and then the ketchup packet. The cemetery was old and gorgeous with a giant patina angel at the grave of a sculptor, and lots of other classic cemetery tropes. There were even a pair of deer, not the first of these animals we’d see in the abandoned city. With a human population that shrinks each year, other forms of life are rising up, deer included. It felt very post=apocalyptic to see a deer standing on the cracked cement of a sidewalk as we drove by, and I enjoyed it mightily. This is what spooky beauty looks like to me, these red brick homes with their hollow, dark windows, leafless vines clawing up and over the porches, scrambling up the side of the building. Think how luscious it will all be in the summer time, a witch’s fantasy of claustrophobic nature, nature that has overpowered the city, the wicked, sinister nature the pilgrims tried to tame, winning.
I said I hoped my love for this place is plain because once, about twenty years ago, I’d had cause to visit Missoula, Montana, and had written about it, a little travel essay for a lesbian magazine. I’d never seen anyplace like it, and it’s darksided nuances charmed and chilled me – for instance, a giant cage containing a taxidermy bear, and the bear is holding a hand lettered sign reading A fed bear is a dead bear! This whole thing just sitting parked like a car on a normal street. Or, the smell of grease hanging in the air at the truck stop where we’d just missed the Testicle Festival, a celebration of deep-fried bulls’ testes. I wrote about these things and I suppose my outsider gaze was exotifying, objectifying, but I’d thought my love shone through, for isn’t ‘creepy’ a goth’s biggest compliment? I was ignorant to the notion of ‘city privilege’ or that I had any sort of power as a result of living in a queer urban enclave (San Francisco) relative to folks living in Missoula, Montana. The piece got some angry comments from Missoula dykes who felt I was trashing their town. Or maybe it was one single dyke. Maybe we think cities ate creepy! She challenged. Cities Are Creepy! I agreed. I tried to make peace, but the person seemed to want to fight. I eventually looked away, and stopped looking back.
A couple years later and I’m going on a spoken word tour and setting up a show in Missoula. Close to our departure, the arrangements got wonky. My contact person went dark, someone else popped up, or maybe she came back, but was weird. I was assured everything was cool, we had a show, it was upstairs at a tavern in town. Local gays would put us up – me, my trans boyfriend, the dyke and straight cis guy he played music with. Another straight cis guy, the incredible poet Bucky Sinister (after years doing Sister Spit, bringing some straight cis guys I loved on tour felt radical), and a queer femme slam poet. We were a motley crew. It was the last year of my drinking, and I was very messy. My outfit that night was vintage lingerie that, really, just looked like underwear, not like creatively styled, classic Madonna underwear-as-outwear. I just looked drunk and like maybe something bad had happened to me. My shoes were metallic gold stiletto platforms from the Foxy Lady boutique on Mission (RIP). As a femme creature I pride myself on always being able to fight or climb a fence, regardless how ridiculous my outfit, but when I was bum-rushed by a dyke hooligan while onstage hosting the show, my finery made me feel horribly vulnerable. Like a strange anxiety dream, it seemed I was about to get in a public fight in my underwear.
The butch had come up to the stage and yanked the microphone from my hands. MICHELLE TEA THINKS YOU’RE A CREEP! she shouted. SHE THINKS WE’RE CREEPS! WHAT DO WE SAY TO THAT? Thank Goddexx, nobody had much to say. Maybe a couple of half-hearted boos, but this one dyke – a boxer, I later learned – was aggro enough for the entire town. YOU HAVE ALL THE POWER, YOU HAVE THE MIC, YOU HAVE THE POWER. Actually, You Have The Mic, I pointed out. I was at a loss as to how to proceed – with the exception of my thankfully aggro boyfriend, my fellow nerdy tour mates had run for cover, pathologically conflict-averse. Do You Want To Come On Stage, Let’s Talk About It, I suggested. I was trembling at the thought of going deeper into this fight, but there seemed to be no way out but through. Eventually a friend of the dyke came and took her away, but word was she’d be back. I think we did our show? The band Mates of State had played an earlier set and were in the audience watching it all go down.
The boxer did return. After the show I was walking down the wooden staircase with my boyfriend, going out to the van. Resentful dykes aside, Missoula felt scary; while we’d been unloading, carfulls of yahoos drove by yelling at us out the window. I couldn’t get an accurate read on if we were in danger or what. We decided to use the buddy system if we had to go to the van, so I grabbed my boyfriend and we came upon the boxer in the stairwell giving the wall her right hook and grunting I HATE MICHELLE TEA. Alarmed, my boyfriend requested she chill, and she lunged. My boyfriend threw a punch. The boxer got him from behind in a choke move. My boyfriend slammed his body against the front door, swinging it open and yelling HELP! for the brief moment his head was outside the building. The boxer sort of heaved him back inside. I ran into the downstairs bar screaming that someone was attacking my boyfriend. A bartender walked out, and the boxer took off. My boyfriend’s shirt was ripped. Look! He said, incredulous. My shirt got ripped!
As it happened, the whole community, the queer scene of Missoula, all knew this was going to happen. It was planned, an action. And we still had to sleep at their houses that night! Not the boxer’s house – god! But the people who had volunteered to house us had also sat there and watched it all play out, knowing all along it was in the works. Post-show talk with them was tense, terse. Apparently, some years ago, there had been a hate crime in town. Some dykes’ home had been blown up. The closest urban town with a queer paper was Seattle’s The Stranger, which basically bought the homophobic Missoula cover-up, which is that the women blew themselves up. Queers in Missoula felt betrayed by their urban brethren, hence the extreme sensitivity towards having their town called creepy in an urban queer publication. But readers, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, especially after this wild event – MISSOULA IS CREEPY. Fight me! Jk, jk, please don’t.
Kielbasa Two Ways
This took SUCH a turn <3 <3