I gave her the mood ring because I knew she was bipolar but I also liked her. I received two from my admirer in Beiber, CA, along with a million dollar bill, which a homeless guy asked me for before he even saw it. When I pulled it out he laughed. I gave him 50 cents. I'm not Donald Trump. I wore a mood ring too. I didn't give one to my girlfriend who was sitting right there, because she'd just spent three days with her and was annoyed because she didn't chew with her mouth open, (“she can't feel her lips- she had injections-have some sympathy” I pleaded) and left the toilet seat up and wouldn't snuggle. She wore the mood ring on the train back to San Francisco and I kept the list. She kept registering purple but there was no purple on the list. I just knew she would have a mood no one had heard of. Anyone that hung out with Iggy Pop and David Bowie in the seventies should be allowed, I think. She was in 1920's that day, ("I’ll get back to you") and she showed me the books she'd bought from the trannie republican who owns the bookstore in Monterey ($35 worth), who subsequently uninvited her to Thanksgiving the following week, but I didn't have the heart to tell her. The trannies’ boyfriend wants her to change the locks. He’d been with a transsexual speed freak before and no matter how many I tell she has changed her ways no one believes in her. She showed me books on the Ziegfeld Follies, which I knew nothing about. At her hotel she showed me the art work she has been doing with Tommy, the gay guy who leaves her for slim, younger boys, and then leaves her again. “I’m his heart," she says. They are really good, I say. Tommy is the only one who has ever combined clown sex with Tom of Finland, she says. He is part of the art crowd, Bjork and all them. Before we leave she applies lipstick and a roach crawls across the mirror. "Oh god," she says, "not in front of company," and swats it to the floor, never missing a beat. There is one leather bar that still lets her in nowadays. She was banned from the Eagle. The bartender is nice but no one talks to us. I am a short, transsexual male and she's a tall, transsexual woman. They have their reasons. There is no place to sit so we walk behind a curtain to smoke with the leather boys. They are ugly, fat and think they're something else. If I were into guys, I think, I would not be in to them. She is not either. She called a guy the n-word while sitting at the bar one day because he told her he hated women; and she thought she was kicked out for sure, but it never happened. We went to the Brainwash and I saw my old friend Diamond Dave hosting. She wasn't allowed in there. I brought Mark S. out to her, (the ‘authentic king curmudgeon of North Beach’ I called him in a poem) and he admired her new book. "I only trade," he said as always, and they did. I brought us out two coffees and asked Mark "why does she get 86’ed from everywhere?" "Well in Vesuvios she threatened to kill two people and showed her genitals." She admits this. People do things when they're drunk, she says. We go across the street to the yuppie place for raviolis. The area around her hotel is only half gentrified now that the boom went bust. I realize I’m low on funds so I order a quesadilla. She orders a 6-dollar glass of wine and the raviolis and I don't balk. I feel like they are rushing us so she insists I don't leave a big tip, and I oblige. She shows me more places she's not allowed in.
She calls me Mr. Head Injury and I call her “darling.” We both stopped taking our medication years ago. She’d been knocking people’s drinks over and I was getting a lobotomy. We’re both doing better these days. We’re not going to be on SSI forever, this is our pact; though we have both been on it nearly fifteen years. No assembly line either. We’re going to be self sufficient, do it ourselves. Open a store, where all of our friends can sell their ‘zines, their poetry and their art. On the way back to her house we see a pretty white billboard, with a sign on the upper half, the bottom completely untouched. "It looks like it's just waiting for us," we agree. "I wish we had a ladder or something. We should come back. You should write Smash & Grab,” she says, “no one will know what it means but a few people. Smash & Grab, wouldn't that be wonderful?" I agree and see her off. She asks me for cigarette money and I give her my last five dollars. “You're my biggest fan," she says, and gives me a hug on 9th and Market, back to her hotel where people drool on the staircases and don't know who Iggy Pop is.
Christopher says, "I publish a zine called Zen Baby, and live in California, where I do extremely odd jobs when I can get them. Right now I am working a graveyard shift at a San Francisco hotel temporarily, and have alot of time on my hands. I actually live in Santa Cruz, California where I cohost a Poetry Open Mic in a laundromat."