Black Wave

by Michelle Tea

  Though having your book made into a film was too much to hope for, Michelle and her writer friends did yearn for a fruitless but profitable option. Sometimes a movie company bought up the film rights to bunches of books, stories they’d never in a million years make into movies, just so that some other movie company didn’t get it. The studios optioned the work and let it sit on a shelf and the author collected a check and nothing more ever happened. It sounded like a good deal to Michelle. The movie company would only ruin the book anyway.

  Michelle and her kin spoke proudly about how they would never let Hollywood turn their stories into watered-down, homophobic films, the musicians among them chiming in that they would never sign to a major label, never sell out. To feel the heat in these conversations one would imagine mainstream success was beating down their doors, that Starbucks wanted to sponsor their next tour, that Julia Roberts was itching to play the part of a fucked-up alcoholic baby dyke in her next film. In actuality, no one cared what these queer, low-rent San Franciscan artists were doing. No one was paying attention and that was fine. These artists didn’t really fucking care about anyone outside their world, either. They wanted only to continue and survive. Michelle dreamed of a corporation paying her a thousand dollars to ensure her book was never made into a movie. A thousand dollars! Michelle had never been in possession of a thousand dollars.

  Fabian emailed her when Michelle’s book arrived in the mail. Thanks, he typed. If you ever write a screenplay let me know. Michelle felt the dread of expectation hit her shoulders. Is that what she would have to do? She’d pulled herself from poetry to memoir in order to have more access to the world around her, would she now have to write movies? It was a terrible thought, like needing a job. Michelle already had a job, the bookstore. Writing was the antijob, the fuck you to all jobs, her claim on her autonomy, what kept her feral and free. To hitch her liberty to a screenplay would be to kill it. She’d become an adult, a worker, a grown-up, no longer a writer, not really.

  Screenplays followed prescribed arcs, adhered to formulas that forbid departure on the Tangent of No Return. Tangents were Michelle’s favorite part of writing, each one a declaration of agency: I know I was going over there but now I’m going over here, don’t be so uptight about it, just come along. A tangent was a fuckup, a teenage runaway. It was a road trip with a full tank of gas. You can’t get lost if you don’t have anywhere to be. This was writing for Michelle: rule free, glorious, sprawling. Screenplays were the death of this, and on the offhand suggestion of an acquaintance she now felt a deep pressure to write one. Because she was poor. It wasn’t her fault, she was born into it and it is famously hard to climb out of. But if there was an avenue available to her, even a crapshoot like writing a screenplay, and she didn’t take it and she remained poor for the rest of her life, well then it would be no one’s fault but her own.

  Also in Los Angeles was Michelle’s gay brother, Kyle. Like everyone, Michelle had a family, though she didn’t talk about them much. She had written a little bit about them, and the people around her had read what was written and then this weird thing happened. Michelle would be talking about her family and someone would pipe up, Yeah, I read that in your book. And Michelle would get such a tripped-out, postmodern feeling about it. She thought it poor form for the listener to morph from a person or friend into a reader, a voyeur. It made Michelle feel caught, like she’d done something wrong. Perhaps she had, perhaps it was too much to have written the book. Her mothers certainly thought so. Kym had written a full critique of the book and emailed it to Michelle as an attachment, in it her own linguistic prowess was displayed. She used words Michelle did not understand in order to eviscerate the prose, indeed eviscerate was one of the words, it was how Michelle learned it. Kym was the only one of their clan to have gone to college and thus occasionally felt like an intellectually superior underdog. Michelle didn’t understand why, if her mother was so learned, she hadn’t lifted her family out of poverty—wasn’t that the whole point of higher education?

  Kym’s just jealous, she always thought she’d write a book of her own, Wendy had soothed Michelle, but Wendy refused to read the book at all. Instead, she would pull it off Kym’s bookshelf, scan a few passages about herself, burst into tears, and phone Kyle to process.

  She makes me look so ugly, she’d said to her son. Always smoking. But her mother was always smoking. Michelle felt that if people didn’t like the way they looked in her book then they should have behaved differently. Michelle never tried to make herself look awesome, Michelle strove to portray herself as the fickle, self-righteous martyr she was. If her mother thought chain-smoking was ugly behavior for a lady, she should quit. Michelle didn’t feel great about this hardness but she could see no other way.

  I thought she made you look noble, Kyle had comforted his parent. Like a hard worker, a really good worker.

  Wendy was a nurse at a state hospital for the insane. This had really compromised Michelle’s adolescent fantasy of being locked up in a sanitarium. Hers would not be the manicured lawns and curving mahogany staircases traversed by wealthy friends sent to McLean in Belmont, the prestigious asylum of Anne Sexton and Girl, Interrupted. No, if Michelle lost her mind it would be off to a state loony bin, horrible places run by hardened New Englanders who looked down on the mentally weak. Get it together, she imagined a caretaker hissing, slamming Michelle’s meds down on her tray. New Englanders were more bitter and resentful than people of other regions. They couldn’t fake it like a Southerner, couldn’t make it passive-aggressive like a Californian.

  What the fuck are you? local strangers routinely demanded from teenage Michelle, on buses and trains, in stores and in the street. Her beauty ideal then was hair erupting in a mushroom cloud around her head, bangs obscuring her face like a veil, lips blackened with the gummy Elvira-brand lipstick drugstores sold at Halloween.

  You think that looks good? people she’d never met would challenge her. After a while Michelle began to think every cackle in a public place was aimed at her. If a stranger approached with an Excuse me, Michelle responded like she was ready to beat them with sticks. This was PTSD. Michelle was so damaged from it that when she finally arrived in the safety of San Francisco and a kindly ex-hippie looked at her hot-pink ponytail and chirped Nice hair! Michelle turned on the woman with a growling Fuck You! People had said Nice hair! to Michelle all the time in Massachusetts and never, not once, had anyone actually thought her hair was nice.

  Teenage Michelle knew that everyone at the state hospital—the doctors, the nurses, the cooks and cleaners, the receptionists, the handymen and lunch ladies—all of them thought the patients were scamming the system, faking crazy so they wouldn’t have to work a day job while they were working their asses off as butlers to the pathologically lazy.

  If Michelle were to give in to mental collapse she wanted to be gently caught, fed well, and given restorative craft projects. Her wealthy punk friends got to silk-screen Misfits T-shirts at McLean. At the state hospital there was only a television bolted to the rec-room wall, some board games with pieces missing, plastic furniture dotted with charred holes where patients nodded out on their meds while smoking. The room felt like the setting for a gang rape. Teenage Michelle kept it together.

  The people who’d read Michelle’s book, who knew about her mothers and interrupted to tell her so when she spoke of them, made Michelle clam up in hot embarrassment. They deprived her of that basic human pleasure: sharing your story. The shame she felt! Like when you’re telling an anecdote and someone interjects—Yeah, you already told us that story. Oh, no—you are repeating yourself, you cannot stop talking, you are so checked out you cannot remember what you have said to whom, you are so self-involved. To hear a person say Yeah, I read that in your book is this shame times twenty. You so cannot stop talking that you actually wrote down your talk and then expected others to read it, and not even that will exorcize your narratives, you will in fact continue to talk and talk, expecting us to pretend we
don’t know the story, which you have performed into actual microphones in public places. Guess what, Michelle? We know your mother is a chain-smoking lesbian psych nurse. Everyone does.

  Michelle didn’t know how to rectify the situation. She supposed it was simply a consequence of her writing and she would have to man up to it.

  So she spoke little of her family, but she had one. Two mothers, one a disabled intellectual and one an underearning caretaker of the crazy. Wendy could have gone back to school and upgraded her degree but she preferred to stay where she was and judge those with more success. Michelle was just like her, they both enjoyed scorning those who had taken steps to better their lives. Wendy felt she was too old to go back to school and Michelle understood, at twenty-seven she was also too old to attempt college. Too aged, too proud, too broke, and too hapless. They had selected their paths, Michelle and Wendy and Kym, and there was nothing to do but continue the trudge forward and see what happened.

  After Kym got sick, Wendy got depressed, and the moms had been frozen in this configuration for about twenty years. The last time I had an orgasm was when I was conceiving you, Wendy overshared. And Kym only did it because we knew it helped my chances of conceiving and the sperm had been so expensive. Horrifed, Michelle urged her mother toward basic masturbation.

  Do You Have A Vibrator? she cried into the phone. Do You Want Me To Get You One?

  No, where would I get a vibrator, you think I go to the Combat Zone? I don’t want you going into those places either, you’ll get raped.

  How, Michelle marveled, were her mothers lesbians? They were totally ignorant of feminist sex shops. They were lesbian townies.

  There Is A Woman-Owned Sex Shop In JP! Michelle said. She could imagine her mother gesticulating a no way gesture, a wave of hand, a stink face, and a shrug.

  That place is for college students, Wendy said.

  Well, You Don’t Need A Vibrator To Have An Orgasm, Michelle counseled.

  The conversation was creepy, a sort of reverse incest that left Michelle feeling like she’d been inappropriate with her mom. Now the woman would never be able to masturbate without thinking about her daughter wielding a vibrator and interrogating her.

  Wendy had carried Michelle, pregnant with sperm from a sperm bank, and Kym had carried Kyle with sperm from a penis that had actually been inside of her. They’d chosen the old-fashioned way because the likelihood of impregnation was higher, the risk of complications lower, and it was free. Kym and Wendy did not have a lot of money and they were offended, as lesbians, to be forced to pay for something straight women received gratis, something men spilled on the ground all day long. The donor had been an old community college acquaintance of Kym’s. They’d selected him because he was smart and good-looking, and if he was a bit of a pompous jerk, well, that surely was not genetic, that was cultural, a man raised in a man’s world, they weren’t going to find a handsome, intelligent man who wasn’t arrogant, they let it slide. Kym got pregnant right away, but they kept at it for another week or so, just in case. Out came Kyle. He looked exactly like his dad, only gay.

  Thank god you’re gay, Wendy would say. Both of you, and I would have loved you both no matter what, we had no idea we’d be lucky enough to have two gay kids, but you, Kyle, I thank god. You look so much like that donor, but then you look so gay, it breaks it up.

  “That donor”? Do you mean my father? Kyle liked to dig. But he did look gay. He was tinier than Michelle, with impressive, compact muscles he did absolutely nothing to earn. Living in Los Angeles, Kyle spent most of his days on his ass in his car eating Del Taco and Burger King. The poison California sun had blonded his hair, which he kept in a stylish, gay haircut. His clothes were skintight and he swished. He had that excellent and scary gay-boy humor, a sharp, searing wit honed in the busted part of New England where they’d grown up. He’d gotten fucked with a lot. The same boys who messed with him in the street later sought out complicated scenarios in which blow jobs could occur. It had germinated in Kyle an affection for rough trade, for macho, bicurious straight dudes, self-loathing faggoty thugs, and Craigslist DL hookups.

  It would be sweet to be close to Kyle again. Of course she would have to hide her drug use, even some of her drinking, her brother was bizarrely innocent about such things for a gay man. But Michelle was thinking that in Los Angeles she would lay off the drugs. Her drinking would also slow down. She would become healthier away from mossy, soggy San Francisco. Kyle hated San Francisco. He thought the gays there had no ambition, they wanted only to fall into an infantile orgy of suckling and self-obsession, constantly trolling for hookups and making a big rainbow deal about how gay they were. In Los Angeles Kyle was out because he couldn’t not be, he was such a sissy, but it was no big whoop. San Francisco was so retro like that. Kyle was postgay and, like his mothers, a bit of a townie. He was an assistant to one of the most powerful casting directors in Hollywood, a famously psychotic bitch. It was Kyle’s dream job, he felt like Joan Crawford’s personal assistant. When his boss hurled an ashtray in his general direction, he let it smash upon the wall, raised a waxed eyebrow, and made a brilliant deadpan comment. Kyle felt his purpose in life was to be witty, to perform capability with flair and style, like a secretary in a 1950s movie. To be the secret backbone of the more accomplished yet unstable figurehead, privy to the private breakdowns, the one handy with a glass of Scotch and a touch of tough love. The one, Kyle hoped, to inherit the business, to feature prominently in the will when the woman keeled over young from a stress-induced heart attack.

  Kyle, too, had previously suggested Michelle move to Los Angeles and write a television pilot, but Michelle had resisted. She did not want to write television pilots, she wanted to write another memoir, something that was feeling harder to do. At twenty-seven, Michelle had already covered the bulk of her life in her one published book. She recalled Andy pulling away in her fabulous car, hollering out the window, Don’t you ever fucking write about me! Michelle was haunted by the thought that the work she did, her art, brought pain to other people. People she cared about, whom she’d been close to. Her mothers were bummed. Kyle was uneasy, though he did his best to be supportive. Now Andy was resentful in advance. Michelle’s bravado—don’t act that way if you don’t like to see it in print—was wearing thin. It seemed to require a certain ugliness to maintain it. She’d grown weary of herself. Perhaps she would try something new. Could she write about herself without mentioning any other people? That seemed impossible. She could fictionalize things but this ruined the point of memoir, frustrated the drive to document, to push life in through your eyes and out your fingers, the joy of describing the known, the motion of the book ready-made. It had happened! It was life! Her job was to make it beautiful or sad or horrifying, to splash around in language till she rendered it perfect. Perfect for that moment.

  Michelle didn’t believe in perfection, in writing or anything else. Belief in perfection was a delusion that spawned mental illness. But she could capture the essence of a moment, the moment her mind conjured the words to document the scene—yes. This was writing to Michelle, but it was no longer allowed. Poor her! She would have to write fiction—real, actual fiction. She would have to write a screenplay. She didn’t want everyone hating her forever and she didn’t want to be a loser. She would have to move to Los Angeles.

  9

  Kyle was thrilled that Michelle was finally moving to Los Angeles. In two phone calls he secured for his sister a studio apartment in Hollywood. The studio was $400.

  I’m so glad you’re not going to hang out in San Francisco forever, waiting to get evicted, Kyle clucked. News of the city’s dot-com upset was leaking out of San Francisco and into the nation. Rents in San Francisco were now officially more expensive than in Manhattan. People were charging $2,000 to sleep in a closet. High-paid Silicon Valley execs were spending the night riding buses, unable to find a vacant apartment. Strippers were coming from all over the country to dance in Bay Area strip clubs, collecting big
tips from Internet nerds. The city was coming apart.

  But Michelle had paid only $200 to live in her shab-by-chic room. And she was in no danger of being evicted. Her landlord lived right downstairs, a sad widower named Clovis who gave the household platters of supermarket cookies at Christmas. Michelle had learned that before the straight girls had occupied it, the flat had been a haven for fucked-up, dysfunctional lesbians. Ekundayo’s room had been a practice space for Tribe 8, the dyke punk band that performed topless and pulled dildos from their pants, goaded men from the crowd to fellate them, and then castrated themselves and flung the silicone into the audience. Man-hating lesbians who couldn’t cope with reality had lived there, pulling traveler’s-check scams, faking insanity to get on SSI. Roommates had pooled lists of ex-boyfriends and hustled them out of money for nonexistent abortions.

  When she moved in, Michelle had had no idea that the house had been a magic castle of queerness with a secret outlaw history. It was as if the Dillinger Gang had hidden out there. A lesbian porn had been filmed in her bathroom! An infamous lesbian hooker had once lived in her bedroom, had nailed hardware into her floorboards to tie down her lovers! Michelle had restored the flat to its former glory, all rooms occupied with barely functioning lesbian alcoholics. And now she would leave.