Black Wave

by Michelle Tea

  11

  Then the van got stolen. There was a dizzying minute when Michelle spun around the empty parking spot, discombobulated. She’d moved it, hadn’t she? She had left it right there, yes, yes. She reeled, looking at the landmarks. Near the free clinic where she had gotten her most recent HIV test. Near the discount grocery store with the intense lighting, where that food riot had happened a few months ago. Right there. And it wasn’t. It wasn’t there. Michelle stood hapless and blinking, waiting for it to tool around the corner, a cartoon van with winking eyes where its headlights should be. Just kidding! It would honk its weak little honk. That didn’t happen.

  The sun skulked lower in the sky, then lower still. The bastard sun had shone upon the thievery, done nothing to stop it. Stolen in broad daylight! The insult of it. As if she had been doubly tricked, as if she should have been able to stop it simply because she had been awake. But Michelle had been at work, at the bookstore. Hanging out in the Self-Help section. She liked to read books about alcoholism and personality disorders to assure herself that neither was a problem in her life. When she finished pretending to organize Self-Help she moved over to New Age and consoled herself with astrology books. Aquarians weren’t really prone to addiction, that was more Scorpio’s jam. Sagittarians could also get out of hand, Cuidado, Ziggy! Michelle felt better already.

  That afternoon Michelle walked sadly through the Mission. The day’s smog was a thin gas in the air, growing weaker with the sun’s disappearance. There was that smell in the air all the time, the tinny stink of environmental collapse. The fog clung to Michelle’s glasses and wouldn’t come off, her view of life perpetually smeared. She decided to get sushi. We Be was empty, she sat in the window and gazed out the mucky glass. What will I do? Michelle thought. Police report. She remembered when carrots were more plentiful, how they would be gratis in a little glass cup on the tables. Michelle didn’t care about vegetables but missed the orange cheer of them. The walls of the sushi restaurant were marked with broad Xs over fish that had gone extinct. Michelle ordered a cucumber roll and a bowl of rice.

  Okay, a police report. Then what? Rent a moving truck. But Michelle couldn’t get a moving truck, she didn’t have a driver’s license. Or, she realized, a credit card. Did you need a credit card? Michelle had a debit card from the credit union. It only worked at the ATM machine at the co-op grocery store. Maybe Michelle wasn’t equipped for life outside her immediate vicinity. Too Bad, she told herself darkly. Her room was already rented out, she’d been swiftly replaced. Ekundayo couldn’t wait for her to leave, and Stitch—Stitch was hurt by Michelle’s move. She felt abandoned. She wasn’t going to beg Michelle to stay in their rotting home, notching off the days with knife marks in their arms. Fine, go, see if I care. It had been Stitch who had sourced Michelle’s replacement. A girl from Olympia, Washington. Olympia still had living trees, why would this girl come to busted San Francisco? Michelle thought scornfully. But she was leaving for Los Angeles. You can’t let the apocalypse rule your life.

  Michelle would find someone to drive her to Los Angeles. Maybe her new friend, Quinn. Could Quinn get permission from her husband to go on a road trip with her lesbian, heroin-snorting new friend? That’s not what I am, Michelle scolded herself.

  Once in Los Angeles Michelle would have no car. She thought about this and gave an internal shrug. So what, she’d be another carless loser in Los Angeles. Michelle was used to being various sorts of losers. You weren’t a loser if you didn’t drive in San Francisco, though. You were sort of a hero. Even more so if you biked, which Michelle didn’t. She tried to once, when an ex had given her an old mountain bike, and within five days she had almost been run over by a fire truck and had wiped out hugely on the corner of Sixteenth and Mission, directly in front of the bus shelter, trying to drink coffee and ride at the same time. She’d been wearing a plaid skirt that had once belonged to a Catholic schoolgirl when she bailed. Her knees were raw and everyone at the bus stop just stared. Michelle had laughed grandly, to make them feel more comfortable with her accident, but they all just continued to stare.

  Michelle would not be riding any bikes in Los Angeles but she’d figure it out. She loved taking buses and trains, it gave her time to read books. Everything was going to be just fine, Michelle assured herself, as her sushi was delivered.

  12

  Some mornings later the doorbell rang at Michelle’s house. The noise of it gave her bad flashbacks of the days of Andy loitering outside her house, leaning against her amazing car, her tattooed arms folded protectively around her heart, looking at Michelle with kill eyes. No one ever rang the bell at Michelle’s house. Cautiously, Michelle edged to the window. She was hungover but not too bad—her body was becoming accustomed to the heroin, her mornings weren’t ruined with the residual poison, she had learned to metabolize it. She was proud of her mysterious body and its strange wisdoms, its hardiness and strength. Was there nothing she couldn’t endure?

  She slid up to the windows, concerned about her nudity. The gauzy curtains hid nothing from the street, they were but decorative pink ponytails framing the face of her bedroom. She edged against the wall and craned her head toward the glass. A cop car was double parked outside, taking up space with an air of entitlement, its angle on the street jaunty, careless.

  It’s The Police! Michelle gasped, terrified. What had she done? Michelle looked at her desk. Small and rickety and scarred with chipped black paint, it held the remains of last night’s indulgence. The spoon and the lighter and the gutted ballpoint pen. The yellowy bag of cocaine that came with one and ones, the worst cocaine you had ever seen. For a while she’d been snorting it, hoping it would take the nauseous edge off her high, but now that her tolerance had improved she didn’t really need it. It sat there, packaged inside a twisted shred of Saran Wrap. Evidence.

  Hey, Lou Reed, Michelle poked at Quinn’s broad shoulder. Quinn had shoulders like a football player. Michelle’s poke did little to disturb her. Quinn seemed like a giant in Michelle’s bed, a whale beached upon her futon. A lovely beluga, long and white. Tall people were sort of alien to Michelle, whose growth was likely stunted by her time spent in Wendy’s smoky womb. How had this strange creature landed in Michelle’s bed? Surely it was the ocean. Michelle’s sinuses felt waterlogged from kissing her. She was proud of how little she cared if they were girlfriends or not. The part of her heart that usually roiled with longing had been sated by the heroin. Michelle felt more functional for it.

  Quinn’s eyes cracked open as Michelle nudged her in the gut with the heel of her foot. Hey, Quinn, Would You Please Answer The Door? Michelle asked, running her hands anxiously over her nakedness. It’s The Cops. I’ll Hide The Drugs.

  Quinn watched Michelle open a desk drawer stuffed with flyers for long-ago poetry readings and black-and-white strips of photo-booth pictures. With a sweep of her hand she knocked the drugs, the spoon, and the chopped-up pens, the lighter and the wrappers, into the drawer and banged it shut it with the side of her hip, mumbling a rising chant of alarm. The doorbell honked again.

  Get It! Michelle cried, anxious. Please! Quinn sat up in bed, her rarely seen giant breasts exposed to the day. She felt around Michelle’s bedding for her T-shirt. It was a magic T-shirt—when she put it on, her breasts disappeared. Quinn wondered how many times this week she had purchased their drugs in full sight of the cameras the city had mounted on street lights to dissuade drug dealing. They’d been hard for Quinn to take seriously—was there really someone somewhere eating donuts in front of a screen, watching it all go down? No way. But what if she was wrong?

  Um, I’d rather you answer it, Quinn said, thinking, Who is this bitch? First Michelle made her buy the heroin, so as to not risk this “reputation” she thought she had. Quinn had a hard time saying no—like most females, she was codependent—so she approached the dealers and made the purchase, and surely it helped that she looked like a guy, even a weird one. If Michelle made the purchase in her teeter-totter heels and the
slip she was failing to pass off as a dress, it was possible that the dealer might harass her and Michelle would not roll with it, she would get into a scream-fight with the dealer, she would whap him with her heavy plastic purse, who knows what would happen. So, fine, Quinn bought the drugs, but fuck if she was going to answer the door to Michelle’s house, this person who—let’s be real—was still a stranger to her.

  Quinn was proud of herself for this rational and self-protective train of thought. It quelled her fears that her life was out of control. The doorbell shrilled the air around them.

  Oh! Michelle yelped, suddenly lucid. It Could Be About The Van! She pulled a pair of black skinny jeans from the floor and wrestled on a clingy long-sleeved shirt that made her skin look like a rattlesnake’s. She slapped her bare feet down the front staircase. She was suddenly grateful for the cops’ diligence, doggedly ringing the bell, ringing the bell. She flung the door open with a swoosh that scattered the nest of junk mail padding the landing. Grocery store circulars, a local BDSM group’s social calendar, and a postcard announcing Ani DiFranco’s upcoming tour dates washed up around her ankles.

  Are you Michelle Le-Dus-ki? the cop carefully sounded the syllables.

  Yes! Michelle cried. Did You Find My Van? He had found her van. It had been abandoned in a bus zone across from UCSF Medical Center. Let Me Get—Someone, Michelle spluttered, and dashed back up the stairs. They Found The Van They Found The Van They Found The Van! Michelle danced around the room. Quinn felt saturated with relief, a relief that swept through her body like drugs. That was scary. Maybe she would stop being such a miscreant. For years she had been happy with a bottle of wine and whatever pills she could bum off friends with bad backs and anxiety disorders. But she wondered if she could be happy with such chemicals now that she’d seen the bliss abyss.

  Michelle and Quinn left the bedroom, moved past the trash pile and down the stairs. A gigantic heap of garbage sat at the very top of Michelle’s staircase, where feng shui tradition suggested you place an altar to welcome guests and purify outside energies. It had been accumulating there for nearly a year. At first it had been a couple items too cumbersome to place into the trash cans, objects waiting to be left by the curb on Big Trash Night. But no one knew when Big Trash Night was scheduled and no one took up the task of finding out, and so the junk lingered, was joined by more junk, growing until it looked like an art installation, a pyramid of bulging, shiny trash bags, alien pods cocooning new life. In a perverse way Michelle supposed it was a feng shui altar for their era. If nature had mostly been replaced by garbage than wouldn’t a “natural” altar be sort of phony, nostalgic even? The trash pile evoked the shores of Ocean Beach, where the tide brought industrial wreckage on the sand with the blind generosity of a pet cat leaving a kill on your pillow. The ocean wanted only to give and had been wrecked of its ability to bring anything but regurgitated garbage. Michelle thought everyone should live with a giant trash heap in their homes. They deserved it.

  Quinn gave a short glance at the cop and felt her empty belly rumble with hunger and dread. She’d thrown up some pizza last night after the drugs had hit her, that was the hunger. The dread was, well, the cop was bound to mistake her for a boy. Quinn would either have to correct his mistake or sit there, anxiously waiting for the dude to figure it out. The anticipation would be agonizing. If the cop caught his blunder he’d feel played and betrayed and it would be left to Quinn to comfort him. The cop would resent Quinn for being so gender ambiguous—it wasn’t his fault, anyone would mistake her for a man, look at her, why does she look like that if she doesn’t want to be a man anyway, this fucking city, I’m getting transferred to Vallejo.

  Quinn’s gender confusion studded each day with potential land mines. Who knew what would happen? Public bathrooms were famously traumatizing, even in San Francisco. Queers stuck to their bubbles for a reason, the outside world was hostile. But the cop hadn’t paid her much attention since the initial bro-down head-nod. Quinn was passing. She settled into a morning of maleness.

  Without even looking at Quinn, Michelle knew what was happening. Like all females Michelle was codependent, but in femmes codependency could become so sharp, so intense, that it reached psychic proportions. She could feel the atmospheric conditions that produced a gender meltdown, the currents spun her like a weather vane. She hoped her normative gender could somehow smooth the spiky vibrations. She would fill the small space of the squad car with classic female cheer. She would twinkle like a little star. A little, scrawny, strung-out rattlesnake star.

  Michelle wished the public understood the extent gender deviation was punished in their culture. Her wish was naive, Aquarian—who did she think was punishing gender deviation, if not the public? Still, she dreamed of a Black Like Me experiment, something like the MTV show that put a bunch of skinny morons in fat suits and sent them out into the world to cry. People are so mean to fat people! was the tearful conclusion. Michelle loved reality shows that punked the ignorant into feeling compassion. It affirmed her belief that humanity was inherently kind. It just sometimes took a production crew and public humiliation to shock the heart into opening. She wondered if there was a way to enlighten the people to the struggle of her friends. Maybe if they shopped more they’d be more relatable, but you need money to shop and you need jobs for money and it was hard to get a job when people didn’t know what gender you were, hence the need for an illuminating television show. Michelle sighed. Maybe she would find meaningful work in Los Angeles after all.

  So, there’s some blood on the passenger seat, the cop announced as the police cruiser rolled out of the Mission. Michelle had had her face pressed to the glass of the cop car, dying to see someone she knew. How hilarious would that be! Think of the rumors! But it was so early, like eight o’clock in the morning. Michelle didn’t know anyone who got up that early. Maybe she’d see someone stumbling back from one of Captain’s after-parties or something.

  Blood! Michelle gasped. Had the van been used in a crime?

  Not a lot, the cop said. Maybe none at all. But there’s something on that seat. We’ll have to open it up. Michelle and Quinn stared at one another in excited horror. What if there was like a dead body in the van? Both watched a lot of Unsolved Mysteries and had bonded over a mutual obsession with Robert Stack, his suits and his hair and his grim delivery. They liked when he delivered his mournful epilogues before a blue screen no one had bothered to project an image onto. It was so low-rent—the sordid vanishings, the bad reenactments, the alarming sound track.

  If There Is A Dead Body In The Van I Could End Up On Unsolved Mysteries, Michelle whispered, but the cop heard her. He played down the likelihood of murder.

  It’s not like a blood bath in there, he said, glancing at them in the rearview mirror a little too long. Michelle grew nervous. If there was a murder the lovers would be immediate suspects. Warrants to search Michelle’s home would be issued swiftly. Drugs would be discovered and nobody likes a druggie. People kill for drugs, everyone knows that. Drugs are a gateway crime for murder. Quinn was already passively lying to the cop, allowing him to think she was a man even though no one had said anything. It didn’t matter. None of it would look good on paper. Michelle forsook her Unsolved Mysteries aspirations and hoped there were no dead bodies in the van.

  The van—a Dodge, fat and blue—had been brought to the curb at a hectic angle and abandoned. No windows were smashed. The vehicle was laughably easy to break into, you jiggled the handle and the locks practically popped themselves open for you. The pair looked for the blood the cop had mentioned. They found it on the cracked front seat, a few dark red sprinkles on the pleather. A bizarrely familiar sticky nub of heroin clung there as well. A plastic bag of syringes on the floor. The van had been stolen by junkies! A Big Gulp from the 7-Eleven sat on the dash, the ice melted, condensation sweating through the waxy cup. Everywhere were cookie crumbs, as if the joyriding dopeheads had grabbed great fistfuls of animal crackers and crushed them in their palms, fli
nging the sweet debris around the vehicle like confetti. Someone had had a great time in that van. Michelle walked around the side of it and slid open the door for the cop. It was empty.

  All right, the cop said, I got a tow truck coming, you can pick it up at 850 Bryant.

  What? Michelle asked. Can’t I Just Take It?

  It got a ticket for being parked in a bus zone, the cop explained, and on top of that you have a bunch of outstanding parking tickets. You like to park on the sidewalk, it looks like?

  Fucking Ziggy! Drunk driving home from the bar and leaving the van on the sidewalk in front of her house. The arrogance! Those Weren’t My Tickets, Michelle began.

  This vehicle has too many tickets. You pay them at 850 Bryant and we’ll release the van to you. And, here. The cop grabbed the bag of needles and flung them at Michelle. Take care of these please.

  The cop’s work was done. He gave them a nod of dismissal. Michelle was aghast. She’d been pulled out of her narcotic slumber for this? To be abandoned on top of some godforsaken hilly part of San Francisco she had never been to? Where was the Mission? Aren’t You Going To Drive Us Back?

  I’m not a taxi, the cop said. He went back to his squad car to wait for the tow truck.

  What Am I Supposed To Do With These? Michelle shook the bag at Quinn. Never mind what she would do now that the van had been impounded. She couldn’t afford to bail it out, no way. It would rot there. How would Michelle get off this sinking ship of a city? Michelle had to get out of there. The energetic walls of San Francisco were closing in on her. Of course the van had been stolen, her plan ruined, by druggies. How desperate do you have to be to actually inject something into your bloodstream? You did not have control of your life if you were unable to wait two minutes for the drugs to work through your sinuses.