Flower Power

Oakland, 2014

I fell in love with a woman who had been sexually abused as a child, and again as an adult. She had a lot of issues (as do I). One of her strategies for coping with her trauma was a solo show, which she performed around the San Francisco Bay Area to mixed reviews. The piece had real strengths, but there was a grating undercurrent of fecklessness—the sense that she was an eternal victim, even of those who tried to support her.

Though perpetually broke, she was brilliant, and funny. I’ve never known anyone like her. She drew the strangest, most surreal comics I’ve ever seen. One of them featured a tardigrade and an antique violin; another, gleeful talking wildflowers. “I’m afraid to show you my comics,” she told me once, “because you’ll see how crazy I really am.” But I thought they were genius.

She had the most beautiful laugh I’ve ever heard.

In August of 2014, I bought this grinning, wire-stemmed flower to attach to the handlebars of my bike at Burning Man. I bought a second one for her, because this was the portrait of her in my mind’s eye.

For a short time our passions coincided, and we were crazy about each other. Then she fell away. But you know me; I hold onto things. That October, during a run of her show in San Francisco, she told me that a patron was about to give her a $2,000 grant. Could she borrow the money, and pay me back at the end of the week?

Never heard from her again, but we’re still Facebook “friends.” She’s in Hawai’i now.