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ORIGINALLY BORN with her estranged father’s last name, Tea stumbled into her adopted moniker in San Francisco, where she moved in 1993. Moving to a new city always offers opportunity for self-reinvention, and Tea tossed around "fantastic, punk-rock, angry-girl" pseudonyms like "Michelle Fury" and "Michelle Rage." But when she had to register at her first open-mike night, she blanked. "The person ahead of me had just signed their first name and their last initial, so I too just signed my last initial: Michelle T." Her poems were so well received that she was asked to be next week’s featured poet. Michelle T. accepted, and Michelle Tea was born.

Back then, there were open mikes every night of the week in San Francisco — but they were very "dudish." "You had to have a certain temperament as a female to go in there and withstand it," Tea recalls. "You’d have to sit through offensive poetry, you’d have to be able to tell people to shut the fuck up on stage." So she and Sini Anderson started Sister Spit, their own female open-mike night.

"It’s hard to not feel like you’re a stand-up comedian when you’re doing a lot of spoken word," Tea says. "There’s this urgency when you’re writing things for spoken word because you’re trying to hold an audience’s attention who’re kind of, like, fickle. They’re probably at a bar, they’re drinking, you want to give them strong emotions. You want to make them laugh. Or freak them out."

And so Tea’s first two books were written "by a drunk person, for drunk people." Up until recently, her creative habits were nocturnal, long-handed, and drunken. She’d scrawl in a notebook at bars and coffee shops, writing stories until closing time. Sometimes, she’d run into the bathroom to snort coke when the alcohol became soporific. She wrote and performed Valencia during her Sister Spit days. Released in 2000, it established Tea as a woman of letters, landing her work on the Village Voice Literary Supplement’s Top 25 Books of 2000 and scoring her a Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Fiction, though it was written as a memoir.

But in some sense, Tea is still trying to live Valencia down. In it, she runs around San Francisco smashed, makes out in dyke-bar bathrooms, gives drunken tarot-card readings, stalks a girl with Madonna tattoos, ends up at a fetish warehouse party, makes out some more, gets drunk some more, and falls in love. "After [Valencia] I was getting hit on in weird ways by drunk girls at weird bars. On the one hand, that’s totally flattering. On the other hand, I felt really weird, like what have I done?"

Since the book’s cast of characters were Tea’s friends, lovers, and acquaintances in the queer community, everyone knew exactly who was who, though the names had been changed. Valencia became the Mission’s Peyton Place. "When I was reading them at open mikes and they weren’t published anywhere, people loved them," Tea says now. "The minute it was published, people started complaining, people in the queer community. I was really puzzled by that. I was like, ‘God, you all liked me before. They’re the same stories!’ "

The Michelle in Valencia is a bold, flirty dyke who’s just as likely to rip off her shirt as burst into tears over a broken heart. But Tea acknowledges a fissure between narrator and author. "I feel really small and unsure a lot of the time, but that doesn’t make for great stories," she says. "I don’t know if people even want to read about that."

The disconnect between character and writer was especially pronounced in Valencia, since its stories were five years old when the book was published. "When it came out, I felt like a dramatically different person. So I felt like I was being consistently misunderstood by the world," Tea says. "And it was weird to go out and to read from it as if these stories had just happened, when in fact they’d happened like five years ago. And I just felt a little worried that I’d be thought of as this shallow tramp."

In 2000, when the dot-com yuppies were taking over San Francisco, Tea moved briefly to Los Angeles. At around the same time, she started to confront what she’d recognized as a drinking problem. Ultimately, she quit booze. "I got a lot of mileage out of drinking and then writing, but it isn’t ultimately sustainable," she explains. "It got to the point where I couldn’t read my writing the next day. It didn’t make sense. I thought I’d written something totally fuckin’ brilliant and the next day, I’d be like, it’s so trite and sappy and melodramatic — just like me. So I had to stop."

In fact, Tea quit everything — smoking, boozing, doing lines in the bathroom. "It is kind of heartbreaking to read my favorite passage in The Chelsea Whistle and know that I was coked out of my brain while I was writing it," she admits. "Because you want to just think [drugs] don’t help. But in fact, I think it’s more complicated that that. I think it does help, until it stops helping. And then it really hurts you. Then you have to mourn the loss of what was once this great tool for you."

These days, caffeine is her sole chemical indulgence. But even if she hadn’t become a teetotaler, Tea wouldn’t continue writing books about drinking. "Getting drunk is only a funny story the first 10 times you write it," she says. "And then, it’s just kind of pathetic."

tea and Kayiatos climb into a car bound for Chelsea. A small, strutting figure ("I’m small, but I’m a tiny powerhouse"), Kayiatos has just had his fortune told by a psychic leather daddy who once eyed Tea and told her he saw her with a book on a stage. Tea leans on Kayiatos’s shoulder and suggests the photos for this story be shot at the Salvation Army store "for selfish reasons, so I can go shopping." (Since arriving in Boston nearly two weeks ago, she’s bought two pairs of shoes. She buys a third this afternoon.)

Later, they have a dinner date planned with Tea’s extended family. "You were telling me," Kayiatos says in the car, after the photo shoot. "Get ready to hear a lot of offensive stuff."

"You’re going to look forward to being offended," says Tea. "You’ll be less bored. It is so boring. My uncle is going to talk about his truck. And then he’ll start talking about Puerto Ricans. And then he’ll talk about the truck again."

"I met the rest of the family," Kayiatos explains. "Actually, I met her Aunt Nancy before I transitioned. And Nancy was like, ‘I don’t know, honey, you’re always going to be a woman to me,’ " he says in a thick Boston-by-way-of-Brooklyn accent. "I was like, ‘But I’m just meeting you for the first time! How can I always be a woman to you?’ The next time we went back there, as you can see, I don’t look like a woman anymore. And she was like, ‘Oh, wha-ow! So it worked!’ "

Tea interrupts to point out another Chelsea Whistle marker, the former site of her childhood dance classes, called Johnna Latrotta’s Broadway School of Dance in her book. "Alicia’s Market is where the dance studio used to be," says Tea, pointing to a bodega storefront. Tea rattles off Johnna Latrotta’s real name, an Italian moniker fit for Mama Celeste.

"You change the names to keep them safe?" asks Kayiatos. "Or is it to keep you safe?"

Camille Dodero can be reached at cdodero[a]phx.com