E-Mail This Article to a Friend Chelsea girl (continued)

That poem is a guaranteed crowd pleaser. When Tea reads it at the Cambridge Family YMCA’s Durrell Hall, she wins over the audience of cropped-haired, turtle-necked females. On stage, Tea looks more bookish than one might expect. In photos from her Sister Spit days, she’s always decked out like a rock star, all tangled green hair, red-feather boas, tattered Ramones T-shirts, long strings of fake pearls, and purple schoolgirl uniforms. "Michelle’s very into costumes," says Nomy Lamm, a performance artist who went on the road with Sister Spit. "On tour, she’d have on a different sequined tube top each night."

But Tea isn’t the same woman she was 10, or even five, years ago. For the first time in her life, she’s not working a "crappy-ass" job — answering phones, giving away cigarettes at cheesy bars, selling books, selling her body. Instead, she’s freelancing for publications like the San Francisco Bay Guardian (she co-writes its weekly astrology column, "Double Team Psychic Dream"), the Believer, and On Our Backs. She hosts "Sorry, You’re Poor," a monthly reading series at the San Francisco Public Library. And she’s been in a relationship for the past five years with her female-to-male transsexual boyfriend Rocco Kayiatos (a/k/a hip-hop artist Katastrophe), nine years her junior. They eloped years ago, but Tea doesn’t think they’ll ever get married legally — she says she doesn’t want to ruin his credit.

Because even though Tea can get a glowing review in the New York Times Book Review and an invitation to read at Stanford University, her credit is in such disarray that she can’t get a cell phone. "I went to T-Mobile and the guy’s like, ‘I’m going to try and see if I can get them to waive the deposit for you,’ " she says. "I was like, ‘Okay!’ I was feeling all sassy, like, ‘I’m getting a cell phone!’ I had resisted getting one for like a year until now. I am traveling so frequently that it’s really messing me up to not have one. And then they’re like, ‘We need a $500 deposit.’ I almost started crying. I was like, ‘You’re kidding me? My credit’s that bad?’ "

Her credit is that bad, and her reckless past haunts her. "I’m more responsible than I ever have been in my whole entire life," Tea says. "I’m totally not on drugs, I’m not involved in an illegal profession, I actually have more money than I’ve ever had, and I can’t get a cell phone. There are crazy people on the bus talking to themselves and they’re carrying cell phones. Why can’t I get one?"

MICHELLE TEA has always been a writer. In elementary school, after having a birthmark surgically removed from her head and patching up the hole with skin from her butt, she recalls "sitting down and trying to write the story of a little girl who gets a birthmark removed from the back of her head." In fifth grade, she scribbled a script for an episode of The Facts of Life. After high school, she self-published ’zines, one of which got a positive review in Maximum Rock ’n’ Roll’s queer-’zine issue. "I am absolutely compelled to write my own stories," she says. But she doesn’t know why. "That’s just a mystery. Like, why are some people painters?"

Growing up in Chelsea, Tea received a lackluster education. After getting kicked out of private Catholic school for having dyed-black hair and defaulting on tuition payments, she attended Northeast Metro Regional Vocational, in Wakefield, and then Salem State College for one semester, an experience that inspired a poem called "Hell Is a State School."

"I thought I was going to have this archetypal New England experience," she remembers. "I wanted to live in a dorm and walk across a lawn wearing a backpack. And it was just a terrible experience. Living in this cement-block room that was like a jail and sharing it with this other girl whose boyfriend slept over every night." She frowns. "They would have sex right there in the room."

This last complaint seems downright funny coming from Tea, who has written about fisting in public bathrooms and borrowing extra latex gloves from a roommate after exhausting her own supply of safe-sex materials. But the sex in Tea’s work isn’t lurid or sensual — it’s always cast in a breezy narrative, whispering private insights into characters and their dysfunctional relationships.

One of Tea’s most memorable sex scenes occurs in Valencia, a chronicle of one lesbian’s promiscuous romp through San Francisco during her first year in the city. In the opening chapter, Michelle falls into bed with "Petra," a pierced, truck-driving dyke who gets kinky with a jagged knife and demands rough sex.

"I really like writing about the absurdity of sex," Tea confesses. "There’s only so much that we can do with our bodies. So ultimately, the actual sex is going to be kind of boring. What’s important is: who are in the bodies that are having sex? What are they thinking about? What dramatics have brought these people together? That’s a lot more interesting to me than the kind of mechanics of who did what to whom."

"People don’t get that she writes about sex like it’s totally awkward and vulnerable," says Kayiatos. "She writes about it like it’s real, which I think ultimately makes it sexy. But then people are like, ‘Oh, she’s an erotic writer. And I’m like, no, she’s not.’ "

So it was odd that Tea was asked to guest-edit this year’s Best Lesbian Erotica anthology. "If I had my way, it would’ve been a book of complete anti-erotica," she jokes. "I thought I was going to end up poking my eyes out with a stick at the end of that." Although she’s quick to say it was an honor to be asked, she’s not really a fan of erotica because "a really wonderful sexual experience isn’t necessarily the most interesting story." Hence, her favorite story in the Best Lesbian Erotica is about two lesbian lovers who manage a sausage factory and have sex with their hands buried in pans of scrapple. "I’m like, that is disgusting. So I picked that one."