Black Wave

by Michelle Tea

  Don’t you ever fucking write about me! Andy hollered, and was gone.

  Michelle placed her two feet squarely in the slop of her guts, feeling the liquid push warmly between her toes. She’d made her mess, she’d lie in it. She walked up the stone stairs and into her home, up another flight of wooden stairs, the years of grime sticking to the vomit on her feet. A flyer for some gay event stuck to her heels and she let it. She left a faint trail of bile down the hall and pushed open the door to her room. The teen stirred, cracked an almond-shaped eye. There was blood on the sheets from where she had pulled into Michelle like a pomegranate. The memory sent a tremor through her, but Michelle knew it was only an aftershock. You Have To Go, Michelle said, Now.

  All right, the teen said. It was perhaps not uncommon for her to be tossed from a strange lover’s house without fanfare. She hadn’t gotten undressed for their lovemaking—that was Michelle’s job. She stuffed her feet into her high-tops and stood awkwardly in Michelle’s cluttered room, a mess of dirty clothes and papers, books and shoes and stupid knickknacks, pictures and photos rippling from the wall in the breeze from the window. One bookshelf was an altar because Michelle was spiritual. Candles and rocks, mostly. She liked to light the candles and hold the rocks in her hands and pray for something to help her out.

  All Right, Michelle repeated, looking at her toes. She glanced up quickly at the teen. Thanks For All That. She allowed herself a smile. She didn’t want to be a bitch.

  Who was that downstairs? Lucretia asked.

  My Girlfriend, Michelle lied, but it did the trick.

  Oh, okay. I better get out of here, huh?

  Yeah, Sorry. Michelle allowed herself a larger, more regretful smile and showed it to the youth: not my fault.

  Well, that was fun, said the teen. Really, Lucretia seemed fine, totally fine after a night snorting heroin, a drug famous for being so bad and awful. She hadn’t puked and she seemed really coordinated. Look at how much a person deteriorates in ten years, Michelle thought. The night had left her barfy and haggard, her life now destroyed. Lucretia gave her a swift peck on the cheek and bounded out the door. She was halfway to the stairs when she turned. Hey, where am I?

  The Mission, Michelle said. Fourteenth Street. Michelle could see that this wasn’t enough information to orient the teen, but, not wanting to seem stupid, Lucretia gave a sharp nod.

  Thanks. She was down the stairs and out the door.

  7

  In the lesbian bar Stitch pulled her wallet from the ass of her baggy black jeans to pay for Michelle’s drink. She wore a cowboy hat on her head and a faded beer T-shirt on her body. She flirted with the bartender, another butch. All the butches were seething with sexual tension for one another. They chased and dated femmes, girly-girls, keeping their clothes on in the bedroom, and then hooked up with each other like straight dudes on the DL, pushing their fists up each other’s pussies.

  Stitch had the word GENIUS tattooed on her stomach and the quadratic formula tattooed on her neck. Her knuckles looked like a calculator keyboard, marked with + and –, % and <. Michelle thought if Stitch hadn’t been a fuckup she could’ve maybe been the next Einstein. She liked to imagine who her friends could have become if they hadn’t been saddled with a low-grade PTSD from being queer, if they hadn’t been forced into the underground, away from the world and its opportunities. Stitch would have been Einstein, Copernicus. She was obsessed with the astronomer Tycho Brahe, who had lost his nose in a duel and tied a golden prosthesis around his head with a ribbon. Stitch tagged GOLD NOSE in barroom bathrooms and bus-shelter walls with Sharpies. She would have been Jane Goodall, Jacques Cousteau. She would have been a marvelous surgeon, her urge to slice herself, her friends, and her lovers with sharp objects redirected toward healing. Stitch talked to Michelle about math the way Michelle talked about poetry, so that it became understandable, even beautiful, a natural language that was both the code and the decoder.

  Michelle was scared and attracted to the strange things Stitch did to her body—the cuttings, how she once heated up the decorative edge of an antique spoon and attempted to sear the design into the skin of her arm. It didn’t work, what she got was a blistered blob, but the idea had been such a good one. In the nineties in San Francisco artistic self-mutilation was not an uncommon way to pass the time. You could pay people to cut swirls into your skin, to brand you like a heifer on a ranch. Once at a lesbian dance party Michelle witnessed the spectacle of a girl sewing up her labia on the bar top. At another club a giant skewer was pushed through a girl’s face, entering her cheek, sliding through her mouth, and coming out the other side. Michelle had seen crowns of pins crisscrossing a shaven skull, she had seen more needles stuck in chests and breasts and sternums. Such scenes became normal astonishingly fast, especially if you were inebriated all the time. Drunk at a party, she once allowed Ziggy to push one such needle through the place where her third eye pulsed weakly, a lighthouse stuck in fog. Michelle barely bled, just a tiny splotch of blood, dry and sticky. She figured it was because she was so dehydrated.

  Outside the bathroom Ziggy chugged a pint of beer and shot pool. Who would Ziggy have been if she had been born into a different place and time, a different gender, with different desires? Ziggy would’ve maybe been David Lynch, maybe Charles Bukowski. Actually, Ziggy was Charles Bukowski. She was that drunk and clever and ornery, that prolific, filling up notebook after notebook with her poems and then losing them. She lost her notebooks regularly, followed by a full day of mourning and angst and then Oh well, what the fuck and she would get to filling up a fresh one with her words. What would it take for Ziggy, queer Ziggy, to ascend to the peak Bukowski died upon? She couldn’t. She was a whiny woman, a complaining queer. In order to have your complaints listened to in this world you couldn’t have that much to really complain about. Otherwise, Ziggy could have been Malcolm McLaren—someone in the shadows who had all the power, you could not see her but you could smell the smoke from her cigar, hear the rustle of dollars in her pocket. Men in suits would flock to Ziggy for her opinion, and they would pay her handsomely for it.

  Stitch brought Michelle her cocktail and gave her a soft pat on the back. Michelle accepted the cocktail coldly, with a nod at her roommate. Come on, Stitch complained, Stop being like this, you’re being mean. You’re making a really big deal about nothing.

  After Michelle had said goodbye to Lucretia she had walked down the long hallway, the soles of her feet still sticky with barf, toward the kitchen, where she intended to clear her head with a pot of Café Bustelo. It was with shock that she noticed her living room had been painted.

  We did it like a week ago, Stitch shrugged. You weren’t around to talk to, you’re like never here anyway. So we painted the living room. Who cares?

  Michelle cared. The living room was wide and high ceilinged. A giant, busted sofa ran the length of one wall, its cracking plastic stabbing your thighs. It had been there when Michelle moved in seven years ago and her hunch was that its origin was the streets. Along another wall ran a low bookshelf and another wall sported a glass-paned built-in cabinet also stuffed with books: Bastard out of Carolina, School of Fish, Macho Sluts, Infinite Jest. Zines, their fragile pages crimped and torn. Issues of Love and Rockets, not in any kind of order. Lesbian Land, Girlfriend Number One, Hello World, The New Fuck You, Chelsea Girls, Trash, Memories that Smell Like Gasoline, How I Became One of the Invisible. Tiny, precious Hanuman books. Because You’re a Girl, The Madame Realism Complex, I Love Dick, Go Now, The Basketball Diaries, T.A.Z., Angry Women, Shy, The Letters of Mina Harker, The Bell Jar, Queer, Howl, Lunch Poems, Sex Work, Closer, Hell Soup, The Unsinkable Bambi Lake, Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, I Married an Alien, Monkey Girl, Discontents, The Terrible Girls, Bad Behavior. The final wall was a giant window. It looked out onto the cluster of backyards at the center of their block, a mess of dull straw, dead landscaping, fallen trees, and clotheslines tangled with those hardy apocalypse vines. Their own house had noth
ing out back but a foot of concrete and a foot of dirt where their trash barrels lived.

  The glass window was punctured by a BB from a long-ago neighbor. When Michelle first moved in one of the straight girls had told her not to sit near the window during a sports championship or New Year’s because the Mexicans in the neighborhood liked to fire off their guns in celebration. Michelle thought this was racist, but Michelle generally thought anything any white person said about a person of color was racist, so her judgment was not always sound. Still, she pledged to not be scared of holidays or her windows or her neighbors.

  Before the betrayal the living room had been a brutal purple trimmed with mango, a color combo found on cheesy velour pimp suits worn by assholes on Halloween. A bunch of lesbians shooting a lesbian film about lesbian relationships had shot a spin-the-bottle scene in the room, paying a full month’s rent in exchange for constant access and the right to paint the space this horrible color combination. Michelle was glad when it was over, but she had come to love the garish new living room.

  I think I died in a room like this, Ekundayo had commented darkly on the purple hue. In a past life I mean. Ekundayo was morose. And hot. Her long hair was clumped and woven into braids and dreadlocks, she wore only black leather pants and thick hoodies, the hood pulled up over her head. She brought a long dark stick with her when she left the house, in case anyone fucked with her. She smoked a ton of pot and was paranoid, as well as suffering the stress of having been black and female and queer her whole life. Ekundayo kept to herself, living in the back room off the kitchen. It wasn’t really a bedroom, a large industrial sink hung off one wall. Michelle supposed it had been intended as a sort of washroom. A past tenant had installed a rickety loft, making the back room an exciting place to be during a minor earthquake. Seemingly tacked to the back of the building, the room trembled like a plate of Jell-O, the poorly built loft inside the trembling room trembled separately. It was like carnival ride, the kind assembled by druggie fugitives in parking lots. Ekundayo painted the entirety of her little room black, including the door that closed on the kitchen. She made trance music, sometimes layering her own poetry over the beats—spacey, mystical.

  Michelle looked at what her roommates had done to the living room and thought that maybe she had died in such a room once, while institutionalized in a past life. It was a sickly gray green, a color selected by hospitals because it already looks sort of dirty, so any actual dirt goes unnoticed. It was the color of the sky when the sun refused to come out. It was the color of bathwater when you haven’t cleaned yourself in a long time. It was like a dirty shade pulled down against the world. It was the color of her skin, that morning, after her first run-in with heroin, the greige shade of a drugged-out white person. Michelle hated it and she couldn’t believe her roommates would do such a thing without asking her. She was the primary roommate. She was the one who had found the house seven years ago. Back when it had been crammed full of straight girls. A Trekkie who ate lots of meat, had a violent cat, and did Crowleyian magick, leaving cryptic phrases on the walls in marker. She had left to go back to school and study the Civil War. A girl who belly danced at the Moroccan restaurant on Valencia and also stripped at the peep show in North Beach, who had a Muslim boyfriend who didn’t know she was a stripper, who walked through the house in boxers, burping—every lesbian’s fear of living with a straight woman. When she moved out Michelle took her room, the best room, and found sequins from her costumes embedded in the floorboards. Michelle filled the house with a series of transient queer girls. Lara was a jolly Brit who made giant puppets and sponge-painted her bedroom so it looked like a coffee-house bathroom. She had violent fights with everyone who lived there, so eventually she left. Tia the MC and DJ who brought with her a teenage runaway girlfriend who tied up their phone line and left glass beer bottles in the shower. Ellis from Texas, who Michelle had had such a crush on, but then, seeing her with her back thrown out in bed all the time, stoned on weed, asking housemates to bring her bowls of ramen, the infatuation died. Michael, who had just gotten sober and started meditating and was always mad at everyone for smoking crystal meth in the kitchen. Karen, whose mother paid her rent. Stacy, who was totally on heroin, but, as Michelle hadn’t yet met heroin, she believed the girl was simply on pills when she passed out with an ashtray of lit cigarettes on her belly, on the couch, in front of the television set. Stacy had a psychotic break on speed and, thinking there were miniature policemen shining red lights at her, wound up locked in someone’s closet in a Tenderloin SRO, her parents came from South Carolina and took her to a Christian rehab. Michelle had been there forever. Michelle had moved Stitch in and now Stitch was going to go and paint the living room, defend it, and then freak out at the sight of heroin implements scattered across Michelle’s desk. The truncated pen, the burned-bottomed spoon with a tangy ring of drug stuck to its curve. The little balloon the drugs had come in, one and ones, one bag of dope and another of yellowy cocaine so horrible not even Michelle would do it, both of them twisted up in bits of cellophane from a cigarette-pack wrapper.

  What the fuck? Stitch had followed stomping, pouting Michelle down the hall and into her bedroom, to be shocked at the tableau. What are you doing? You’re doing heroin?

  I’m Not “Doing It,” Michelle said in a voice that perhaps a teenager would use with its mother, I Did It. Once. And I Didn’t Shoot It. Michelle was annoyed to have her drug intake policed by Stitch, of all people. Stitch, who she had once spied making a purchase from the Coco, Chiva, Outfits man. Stitch, who Michelle had followed home and found fuming on the front steps, having learned the Coco, Chiva, Outfits man had sold her but a crumble of peppermint candy and not an amber nub of chiva. Stitch had tried to convince her to walk back to Sixteenth and Mission and make the Coca, Chiva, Outfits guy give her her money back, which even Michelle, at that naive moment in her urban education, knew was ridiculous. This was who was going to police her drug use? Stitch who had once knocked on Michelle’s door and asked, Hey, will you check on me every so often to make sure I don’t die? Sure, Michelle had said awkwardly, not bothering to ask why her new roommate thought she might die, knowing it had something to do with drugs. Stitch, who had once shot ecstasy in the closet, then fucked her best friend’s girlfriend, then crawled into bed with Michelle to cuddle because the drug had made her cold. You Shot Ecstasy? Michelle had asked, incredulous. Who Shoots Ecstasy? It works faster, Stitch had chattered. How impatient, Michelle had thought. This was the person monitoring her drug ingestion?

  Okay fine, fine, I’m sorry, okay? Stitch had her hands in the air like it was a stickup. Michelle, in her foul and sickened mood, decided she would punish Stitch for the rest of the night. Everything was stupid. The heroin, that trickster, had made her feel actual love and then ripped it away, leaving her serotonin at low tide, her stomach nauseous, her pallor unattractive. The teen was a goofball, Michelle was embarrassed at how quickly the simplest person could fascinate her. One pretty feature—and really, who doesn’t have at least one pretty feature?—and she was off, a romantic narrative spinning hay to gold, eking out a nobility, a deep sense of profundity out of your average drunk, fuckup, hasbeen, never-will-be. Michelle saw potential the way a psychic saw auras. It was a gift, in a way. It was like she was some sort of love Buddha. But it was dumb, too. She had blown it with Andy again and she would not go back, not even if Andy would take her, which, Michelle hoped for Andy’s own self-esteem, she would not. What would she do? Hang around and wait for another date to pop up. Get drunk and etc. with Ziggy and Stitch. Work at the bookstore. Fall in love and be all yeah this person is magic, this is the one, yeah! all over again, with no sense of irony, and once again ruin the relationship—somehow, Michelle would figure out how to ruin it. She began to cry into her cocktail, salting the sweetness. Stitch (who was really a true-blue friend, really a tender heart, a sensitive, caretaking Taurus to the core, one who resented astrology and all the fake sciences), came quickly to Michelle and hugged her
fiercely.

  I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. Listen, we’ll paint it back. We’ll paint it whatever horrible color you want, me and Ekundayo will do it.

  No, No. Michelle brushed her away. Stitch’s face was close to hers. It was a thin vegan face, one prematurely aged from dehydration and poor living. No matter how much powdered kelp she sprinkled into her PBR, it didn’t matter. Her skin’s lines were deep for a twenty-three-year-old.

  I Don’t Even Care About That, Michelle wept. It’s Everything, Everything. It’s Andy And Our House And The Cockroaches And Love And How Fucking Gentrified The Neighborhood Is Getting And The Dead Earth And My Sick Sad Moms And—

  It’s the heroin, Ziggy chimed in, expert. It really is just the heroin. Let it leave your system, you’ll feel better.

  Take some niacin, Stitch offered.

  The thought of hot flashes on top of all her other sensations sickened Michelle. No, she said, I Have To Get Out Of Here.

  Go home and rest, Ziggy suggested.

  No I Mean I Have To Get Out Of Here, San Francisco, It’s Fucking Depressing. I Have To Move.

  To where? Stitch asked skeptically.

  Los Angeles, Michelle said.

  Yeah right, her friends said in unison, and looked at each other, startled.

  Weird, Ziggy said.

  It’s An Omen, said Michelle. It’s A Sign. I’m Moving. I’m Getting Out Of Here Before It’s Too Late.

  8

  Michelle knew people in Los Angeles. Her friend Fabian had been evicted, moved south, and was now hooked up with some movie company. He had phoned Michelle and asked for a copy of her book. Michelle had sent it along without excitement. Such things happened to books, possibility eddied around them. Michelle knew a couple writers whose books had been optioned for film, but no one whose books had been made into a film. Michelle and her ilk were not the writers whose books became movies. They were the writers who scarcely believed they’d managed to be published at all, who not very long ago were publishing themselves on Xerox machines with stolen Kinko’s cards. They were writers who invaded bookstores to truffle out the shop’s sole copy of their book, then scrawl their autograph on the flyleaf with bleeding Sharpies. They did this not so that a reader could have the delight of an autographed book—no one could be sure such readers existed. They did it to damage the book with their signature and render it nonreturnable. Bookstores can return books that don’t sell, but not if someone draws on its pages, even the author.