"I don’t want to be a good girl because good girls become breeders. I don’t want to be a good girl because good girls are good girlfriends and good cooks and good cleaners and good nurses and good smilers and good at hand jobs. But I am good at all these things. And if you call me a bad girlfriend, I will slap your face.
I used to drive old people around San Francisco in a PT Cruiser when I was twenty-two, I was like a valet caretaker. This one day, I got on a life-lesson bender. I was like, I’m gonna milk these old people of all their treasures! I asked Ms. V., what she’d do if she could relive it all. She was silent, I think she had died. I asked Barbara from Santa Barbara, driving past Stern Grove, I asked her advice on how I should live. She said, be a good girl. I thought, well, fuck.
In New Orleans last summer, I met a palm reader in a millionaire’s kitchen. This palm reader had grown up in Louisiana and she had survived forty years of cocktail parties as a shy squirrel by taking people to the corners of rooms and reading their hands with the help of an old book. By the time I met her, she was the book. I spread my fingers over her hands and she saw me. She saw my shyness. She said, Katie, you’re a good girl. Fuck, I thought. How do you survive parties? she asked. I ask people questions, I said.
I think I am liked by a lot of people because I listen to a lot of people, even when I don’t ask them questions. Also, I like to drink and smoke weed and take acid and molly and mushrooms and dmt and suck dick and climb trees and orgasm in cornfields and volunteer at lit readings and go swimming in the ocean despite the riptide. People are greedy vampires. Being liked and being friends are two different things. Friendship is a mutual cannibalism. I think that more people call me theirs than I call mine.
A good party girl, to quote Sia, don’t get hurt, can’t feel anything. She sings, I’m the one for a good time call, phone’s blowing up, ringing my doorbell, I feel the love, feel the love. I agree with her message. It’s easy to love someone who is fun and good at phone calls. I am trying to cut out the people in my life who are using me, but it is hard to do this, being a good girl. I really don’t want to be a good girl. I want to be a bad girl, but real bad girls don’t buy boxes of condoms. Real bad girls don’t grimace at the thought of failing. Real bad girls have ice fortresses around their hearts. Real bad girls don’t feel bad for saying fuck you.
I want to be a pleasure party on Tuesday and a shadow bitch on Friday. I want to laugh and cry in the same afternoon. I want to live up to this internalized need to give and make others happy while maintaining my own no-how. So many plastic geysers out there, spurting steam sermons. Or piles of rock afraid of their own molten responsibility. I want to talk about how much you’ve hurt me and please don’t freak out cuz you don’t know your own heart. Life is pain and realized desire, great risk and smooth calm: mixed and in cycles. Or else what the fuck’s the point.
I wanna merge with another volcano. I wanna mack on a blockbuster. I have these recurring dreams that my friends and I have built a house at the edge of the open ocean. The wind is high and water cuts across rock, but we’re cozy. I am flying. I dream I am flying and I am good at it. "
***
"Did you know Playboy is gonna stop printing nudes? Is porn called porn for the nakedness or the splayedness? I want to have a seizure. I want to have a seizure and go flying.
I’ve been photographed naked before. By Raphael, mostly. Once, I had my twin sister photograph me on my bed, laying down sideways in a tight turquoise turtleneck, and then a closeup of my face in the bathroom, hair down, looking into the lens. I printed the photos at Walgreens and then mailed them to this 42-year old man I talked to on Aol Instant Messenger. I wasn’t naked in those fotos, but I was 11, so a different naked. Yeah, Raphael photographed me a lot. I look nervous in his photos, towel wrapped around my head, the scar on my collarbone reflecting light. I don’t look into the camera. Or else, I’m sleeping. There’s this one photo he took of me taking a naked nap on his long-ass bed next to his long-ass guitar. My butt looks like a heart. When Anastasia photographed me naked, it was a different naked. Different in the way I trust women I meet on the street and not men. The tensing up was different, there wasn’t this question, what do you want from me? It was that she wanted to see me. When I left her studio, I felt exhausted and full of light, like a piece of my soul had gotten sunburnt from compassionate scrutiny. This one photo, I’m leaning up against the wall: woman Katie body and child Katie face. There is a canyon, between getting photographed by Raphael and getting photographed by Anastasia. The only time I look 11 in Raphael’s photos is when I am sleeping.
I got my IUD removed a month ago because it hurt me every month and because I’m single. I don’t want to be a cocktail of my liberated environment, I want to be me. The doctor shoved two pieces of plastic inside me and told me to cough while she pulled. It didn’t matter that she was a woman, it mattered that she was a doctor. I got my IUD put in with my twin sister, but this time I was alone. The spell I wrote after is called Singletown.
I ain’t got no IUD. I ain’t got no IUD.
I ain’t got no Copper T injecting venom in my pussy.
I ain’t got no IUD. I ain’t got no IUD.
I ain’t got no Western wizardry fucking with my chi."