GODSPEED

Veteran punkrocker Breedlove debuts in print with the story of—surprise—a punkrocker looking for love but finding only sex in a sub-America chock-full of “hags.”

“Jim” is a lesbian punkrocker and a druggie bike messenger in San Francisco. She’s “a regular Major Tom, an Annie Oakley who rides all day and shoots all night.” We follow her here through apparently random and inconsequential events, drug-trips, happenstance encounters with people who have names like Eurobabe, Diamonds, Ally Cat, Pez, Smash, Devastaysha, and The Despondent One. These encounters trigger memories that are just as random and happenstance but that detail Jim’s life as that of a person is far more confident and far less confused than she ought to be. She watches friends turn tricks, delivers lots of unprompted drug-shooting advice, visits her own rundown flat, recounts her latest run-in with the police, dreams about being a man, has a number of affairs with fellow hags, dumpster dines, has a lip pierced, and eventually travels cross-country with a band called Hostile Mucous, driving with the group to LA, New Orleans, Florida, New England, and New York for lots more sex in bathrooms, ever more speed trips, and the occasional riff on love in a modern America. Breedlove writes with the glee of a child giddy over seeing her face on the screen or her name in print; it’s literature as a game of dress-up. She is actually best at the simple, quiet, yet harrowing moments of life that she actively avoids in favor of hackneyed drug pyrotechnics. What emerges is an anti-story whose main riddle is whether what is happening is actually happening or whether it’s all an orgiastic drug fantasy that devalues the plot we non-hags are suspected of craving.

An attempt at a sub-subgenre of clit lit where women hate being women but love women and hate them at the same time. But it won’t work until it gets real.