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THE Chelsea girl who got away balances on train tracks in her ramshackle hometown, gripping a broken umbrella in the drizzle. Snug in a rabbit-fur jacket she bought from a homeless man when she was drunk, Tea tiptoes across the metal rail like a tightrope walker carrying a parasol, then pauses to examine her tatty canopy.

"Why don’t you get rid of that thing?" shouts Kayiatos, who’s crouched nearby on a wooden bench. "You like how ragged and fucked-up it is, don’t you?"

It’s certainly a style familiar to Tea. For one, such adjectives fit her white-trash upbringing, a confused adolescence of Catholic school, racial slurs, and wanton kids limned in The Chelsea Whistle. The tracks Tea walks along make a cameo appearance in the book’s title chapter, which takes place in an urban park where neighborhood children play chicken with barreling locomotives and teenage girls go to third base with fumbling boys. A block away on Heard Street sits another place remembered in the story, a house with mismatched lion statues where 13-year-old Tea would blast the Go-Go’s from the front steps.

"You had to pay a guy in a little booth 50 cents to pass into Boston," she writes in the book’s first chapter. "That made sense. The city was holding us hostage. What didn’t make sense was having to toss the guy quarters on your way back, too. A toll to get into Chelsea?"

The Tobin Bridge toll is now three dollars, but some things about the city haven’t changed much since her childhood — at least, that’s how it appears on a Wednesday afternoon, as Tea passes a raid on the side of the street: a man in a pickup truck with his hands up surrounded by two police cars. Tea got away from all this — the Tobin’s gangrenous ribcage, the filthy streets filled with dirty puddles and crushed Burger King cups, her old supermarket employer — but now she’s back with Kayiatos to have dinner with her grandfather and uncle, who still call Chelsea home.

Tea’s biological father, Dennis, left after her parents divorced, telling his daughters, as recounted in The Chelsea Whistle, "that if we ever saw him walking toward us, we should cross the street, because he would not say hello to us. He would not be a part-time dad." As a teenager with freaky dyed hair, Tea ran into him at a truck stop and he didn’t recognize her. Tea’s stepfather, a friendly former convict who drank heavily and bought pot from Tea’s friends, seemed like an okay guy, until Tea and her sister found out that he’d been a peeping Tom for years, watching them undress.

Does Tea find it strange that people who read her memoirs know so much about her? "I feel like there’s this odd denial at work," she says. "I’m creating this art piece, and I’m enjoying it, and I’m playing with language. I hit the send button on my computer and everyone has it and now it’s getting published. The reality of it doesn’t totally connect. I’m constantly surprised when people know things about me and want to talk about them with me. I shouldn’t be surprised, and I have no right to be surprised. I think there’s a really weird synapse that’s not totally meeting in my head about it. And I should probably be grateful for it, or otherwise I’d probably have a harder time writing."

Of course, Tea has chosen to document her life for public consumption. But how does her mother, portrayed as a kind of hapless martyr in The Chelsea Whistle, feel about the book? "She doesn’t really want to think about the worst choices of her life being dramatized and documented and mass-distributed throughout America," Tea says. "And I don’t blame her for it at all."

IN VALENCIA, Tea and a friend named Tatiana play a game. "Let’s make up rumors about each other and spread them all over town," Tatiana suggests. So they do:

I made up a great one about her answering a suspicious help-wanted ad and it turning out to be an assistant-in-training position with a dyke bounty hunter. You know, a gun for hire. A killer. Everyone believed it because Tatiana’s kind of psycho and would maybe take a job like that. She told people that I was flying to Los Angeles to lead a feminist action protesting The Love Connection. That’s So Stupid, I told her when I saw her again.

So it’s not surprising that when famously elusive 23-year-old writer and fellow erstwhile hustler J.T. LeRoy gets on the phone to talk about Tea, he says right away, "It’s not true that she knocked me up. I dispute the rumors." Actually, what Tea said is that LeRoy proposed to her. "I ain’t going to argue that," he says, in a sweet West Virginia drawl. "But who hasn’t? You have little old ladies that hate lesbians and dykes [that meet her]. And the next thing you know, they’re all like, ‘Michelle, will you marry me?’ "

"She has tons of charisma," writes Fly, a New York artist, in an e-mail. "She is like a little live wire. Every time I see her she has this big smile and wide-open eyes." Fly drew a water-color-pencil portrait of Tea for her own book, Peops (Soft Skull Press, 2003). "It was really hard to pin her down," she writes. "I tried three times to make a date with her and she kept not showing up. For anyone else, I would probably have given up. But Michelle can get away with it."

"She’s not afraid to explore," says LeRoy. "She has this, ‘I’ll go into this with you and I’ll show you what I find,’ and she’s very heartfelt."

As a narrator, Tea isn’t sensationalistic or exclusive. Readers might not be ballsy enough to pull back the heavy curtain from that jam-packed gay bar like she did in Valencia, but they might be curious about what goes on in there. Like a trusted girlfriend guiding them by the hand, Tea takes readers there, dragging them into the dim corners.

"It seems like she regards life as an exploration and she’s using her writing to do that," says Myles, whose book Chelsea Girls (Black Sparrow Press, 1994) Tea cites as a major inspiration. "Michelle reads a mean tarot, and she’s reading the world that way."

"She’s breaking down the door for more people, saying, ‘All right, check this out,’ " says LeRoy. "These people don’t bite."