Wicked Wanda

I needed a short break from politics and this seemed like a good way to it. This poem is the first piece I wrote for my 1993 chapbook Misery Loves Company. It’s a tribute to my bestest best friend in the world, without whom I would have literally been dead several times over. She and I both escaped heroin and the Life in the late 1980s. I love you, Nola.

She has great hair, but. . .
she’d planned on being dead by thirty
a senseless, tragic loss of wasted youth,
an end glamorized by the young and foolish,
until one day she woke to find herself forty-one
and still very much alive despite her plans
so carefully conceived but with careless execution,
now the victim of her starcrosssed love affair
with bathtub methedrine and bad cholesterol,
and thank God that she’d switched to heroin
at the tender age of thirty three
or else she’d really be a mess by now
a view for jaundiced eyes
and beneath contempt of those
who could afford the surgeon’s knife
and if she could scrape the cash together
she’d get her own facelift
and then she’d show those bitches
who smirk and stare at her
deathrock clothes, spikes and jewelry
and look down their collective nose
because she was born with a cock
and they weren’t.

A brilliant artist she was told by all
and most certainly she was
give her a pen and watch
her worst nightmares unfold on paper
a trip into the surreal and the all-too-real
a vacation you cannot afford to take
with your eyes and mind so closed
but she’d make you take it anyway,
and this was not her only gift
but thanks to all of those
well-meaning reckless friends
with good intent and bad judgment
who talked her into art’s pursuit at
the great expense of not becoming who she was
(in truth they wanted her to stay a he)
and so in remorse she spent her nights
shooting crystal meth up into her arm
and eating cuts of poor dead cows
just barely cooked past bloody raw
when her hunger wouldn’t go away
‘til hopefully her heart would burst.

Day by day and year by year
this was her life
until one night she’d done some Dust and
burned her hotel room and took a ride
to the Bryant patch, booked for Reckless Arson
and thrown in K-Tank with a psychiatric case
who’d shot a black man and
white girl in Golden Gate park
because he heard voices tell him to.
After she had been released
she decided she had better work
on becoming who she was
if she didn’t want to burn
another divebag hotel room
and run around the lobby
wearing just a bra and daring the cops
to kick the living shit out of her.

So here she comes a brand new woman
(okay, she’s got a cock)
styling in her leather, chains
and pointy metal studs
in five inch spike heeled thigh-high boots
and a whip at her side
when she’s really feeling it
and great hair for days,
but she was stranded without even cab fare
until she met Miss Crystal who gave her
the nerve to whore,
until she met Michelle who taught her
how to work the streets,
until she finally kicked dope
and quit putting all that money up her arm
and bought silicone instead
and now she’s got great boobs.

There goes Wicked Wanda
you can yell “faggot” at her
from the safety of your car
and she’ll flip you off so casually
and suck that middle finger
just to piss you off
because she knows you lack the guts
to leave your car down here
you little coward from the suburbs
and there goes Wicked Wanda
don’tcha love her in all her heavy metal beauty
don’tcha want her in her exotic slutty outfit,
and if that’s not enough for you
she has great hair.