by Michelle Tea
The smell was something to complain about for the first twenty minutes. It was as if their faces were being cruelly mashed into a vat of wet shit. The humidity rose as they entered the cow cities, the steam of the animals’ sweat and breath and farts, the water systems churning to douse them, all of it changed the air, saturating it, carrying the stench. The sounds, too, the dull bleats and moos. The cows continued alongside them forever. Cowshwitz, Quinn spoke. She had heard of this part of the drive. Her husband had warned her of it, gambled she’d become vegetarian by the time they drove out of it.
The lovers tried various things to save them from the smell, such as cupping their hands over their faces and inhaling instead their own rank breath. Michelle lit cigarettes. She held a carton of chocolate milk over her mouth and nose like an oxygen mask, smelled sweetly sour candy before the stink of shit rushed back in. They breathed through their mouths, giving them the disgusting feeling of eating the smell. Their tongues rooted their gums, searching for the taste of cow dung. Eventually they could no longer smell it, despite the bovine landscape shifting toward the horizon, their collective motion like the swells of a gentle tide. It was creepy to know the horrible shit cloud was still with them, entering their bodies. They would try to locate it, pulling air through their noses the way Ziggy smoked her cigarettes, but they smelled nothing, nothing at all. And so they relaxed, succumbing to their bodies’ merciful denial.
Michelle allowed the incomprehensible landscape to fuck with her mind. The round-backed cows became a sort of sea, she then allowed the sea, emerging beneath the cliffs, to become a menagerie, the lumps of trash beneath the pudding waves taking the shapes of animals she’d seen in books and magazines—a thick gorilla, a wide-eared elephant, the spindly neck of a giraffe. The waves drew back and heaved forward, the nauseated contractions of someone poisoned. Michelle saw real buses and airplanes, shopping carts and the roof of a home. An old telephone pole strung with gunk. She unfocused her eyes and they became dinosaurs, sea monsters. Broken boats bobbed, abandoned, looking like ghostly pirate ships. Perhaps some of them were. Across it all a web of oil stretched, like ebony lace or fishnet stockings.
1
I just can’t open my screenplay with a scene of myself smoking crack in Ziggy’s van, Michelle thought, and deleted twenty pages of text from her desktop. It felt like she’d deleted her stomach, something vanished in her body—well, that was rash. Too bad. The computer glared at her with its vacant cyclops eye, daring her to try again, to tell a universal story.
Michelle wracked her brain for successful books with prominent crack smokers. The A. M. Homes story where the suburban straight couple smokes it after the kids go away. Permanent Midnight, where the guy wrote for ALF but was really a total crackhead the whole time—that one got made into a movie, even.
What made those crack stories work? What made them, um, universal? Michelle suspected class. The suburbanites wanted to shake off the strangling yoke of prosperity and good behavior. Michelle imagined if the characters were black or gay the story wouldn’t work as well. The characters wouldn’t be able to risk it, their foothold on suburbia tenuous as it was. The reader was having a hard enough time trying to relate to a black person or a gay person without then having to relate to a crackhead. It was too much. Though black and gay suburbanites surely deserved a relaxing hit of crack cocaine more than the couple in the Homes story, they would have to settle for a glass of wine with dinner.
What about the television writer? Well, he was successful, that was crucial. People seemed to enjoy stories in which someone who Has It All almost Throws It All Away, but doesn’t. Redemption. For the crack narrative to succeed, the character has to be starting out on top, with a place to fall from. It can begin in suburbia or in the glass-walled office of a television executive. Readers anticipate the rungs descended. Crack wouldn’t work for Michelle’s character. She’s already sort of a loser, really broke, born that way. What the fuck is she doing smoking crack, the reader would want to know. Is she retarded? This is boring. I can read the newspaper for this. For Michelle’s story to be universal, it can only go in one direction, and crack does not further that trajectory.
All the writing had exhausted Michelle. She recalled Andy’s parting words, a curse, really—You better not ever write about me!—is that what she said? Michelle felt bound to it, though she had never agreed, never made such a promise. Still, it would be lousy of her to break Andy’s heart and then tell her secrets. It made Michelle’s stomach lump. She began a screenplay based on Quinn’s relationship with her husband. That was better—a lot of women had husbands. Very relatable. It could be a modern Belle de Jour, where the wife sneaks around with a downwardly spiraling lesbian, snorting heroin. She would have to make Quinn’s hair longer. She’d have to be girly for it to work. Otherwise she just seemed like some closeted lesbian married to a man who is maybe a closeted gay himself for having married such a manly woman. People would just be weirded out by that story. Not universal at all.
Michelle opened the film treatment with a shot of Quinn and her husband on the couch watching The X-Files. The husband idly played with Quinn’s long, luxurious hair. They fed each other popcorn. Michelle tried to imagine what they would say to one another and quickly became bored. Behind her, her knees on the scabby carpet, Quinn glanced at the screen as she packed her duffel bag.
I’d rather you didn’t write that, Quinn said. The story of my marriage. Her hands went up to her head and felt around her mop of messy curls, making sure they hadn’t morphed into ponytails. And why would you give me long hair? I have never had long hair. Not even when I was a kid.
Sorry! Michelle was a little defensive. I Was Trying To Make You More Universal. And Plus It’s Not Really You. She’s Based On You, But She’s Different.
I see she’s different, Quinn said. She has long hair. But that’s it. She has a husband who’s a glass blower, she works at an art museum, she’s having a heroin affair with a lesbian writer. The changed hair doesn’t do anything. It’s like you just wanted to humiliate me or something. If you’re going to write about me at least give me good hair.
Michelle turned back to her computer, feeling like a petulant child. Okay, she said. Fine. I Won’t Write About You. I Won’t Write About My Life Because No One Wants To Be In My Story. I Won’t Write About My Family Because They’re Fucking Over It. I Should Just Give Up And Get A Job At Taco Bell Then ’Cause This Is It, This Is All I Know How To Do, Write These Glorified Diary Entries And Now I Can’t Even Do That Because Everyone Is So Fucking Sensitive.
There was perhaps no way out for Michelle, not at this point. She had taken up documenting her own life with such vengeance, back when it seemed that vengeance was necessary. When she was angry at her moms for not having raised her better, noticed her genius or something, put her in a good school for chrissakes or at least an art program, anything to nurture her creativity, to acknowledge that she was creative at all, that they saw her. What good was having lesbian parents if they didn’t bring you to a goddamn art show?
While she railed against the women who birthed her, she decided, of course, to also rail against everyone who had ever slighted her as she trudged the landmine of childhood, adolescence. So many bullies and squares! So many heartbreakers! The heartbreakers continued into adulthood, and writing was a wonderful place to even the score. Michelle could express herself so wonderfully, her pain, their insensitivity. They would read her words and know that they had had this special, smart person in their arms and they had tossed them away, and they would forever regret it. They would never stop being sad.
There had never been a girl like Michelle in literature, of this she was sure. It tinged her writing with a bit of cosmic justice, which assuaged the icky feeling of self-obsession nicely. Someday she would be dead—as would all the people in her books, their petty problems evaporated—but this book would exist, the most holy object in the world, a book. All their dumb lives were elevated for it. Even a book like Michell
e’s, a small book read by few. It didn’t matter. She had rendered them cinematic in their small lives. Really everyone should be grateful.
Except they weren’t. Quinn was only the latest to protest her inclusion in Michelle’s story—which, basically, felt like protesting their inclusion in Michelle’s life, which didn’t feel great, honestly, and besides, what were they doing there, then? But even this tantrum was but the last gasp of Michelle’s bravado. She’d grown weary of feeling like her writing hurt the people closest to her. She’d become more attuned to their feelings. She’d grown older and read wider and had begun to question how singular and important her story even was. Was she a war orphan, a refugee? No. She was a skinny, white, marginally attractive female living in the United States, where even poor people have MTV. What did she think was so important about her pain?
In reality, Quinn and Michelle weren’t scheduled to meet one another for over a decade, when a series of flirtatious Gchats led to a brief affair involving diners, karaoke bars, and blanket forts. It was sweet for about five minutes, but then Michelle found herself in possession of a bottle of Vicodin from a bout of oral surgery. Believe it or not, Michelle hadn’t ingested drugs or alcohol in eight years. But, being a drug addict, Michelle swiftly began abusing the Vicodin. By the second day on painkillers she had stopped eating in order to increase the chemical’s effect.
Michelle wound up sickened with a panic attack outside an In-N-Out Burger in Hercules, California, sending Quinn inside to get her a cheeseburger, animal style, with fries. When Quinn returned, Michelle was sobbing, terrified she would have to change her sobriety date, awestruck by how quickly she’d become insane. Sober for nearly a decade, all it took was one day on pain pills for Michelle to become obsessed and scheming, starving herself to plump her high.
Quinn didn’t believe in the rhetoric of addiction and thus consoled Michelle, You’re just a girl who forgot to eat. You’re upsetting yourself by seeing it all through this lens of addiction and AA.
Michelle thought that only people who went to AA understood the true nature of addiction. She didn’t hold Quinn’s ignorance against her, but she wondered how safe it was for her to date a person who didn’t believe in alcoholism. Michelle was nothing if not an alcoholic. More than being queer or a writer, Polish, or even female, it was what had shaped her life.
Quinn couldn’t believe that this might be a deal breaker. Let me get this straight, Quinn said. They were heaped moodily in a large curving booth in an Italian restaurant in North Beach. The Mafia Booth, the bartender who had seated them called it. You would break up with me because I don’t agree with your definition of alcoholism. They ate pizza and salad. Michelle still felt off from her pill binge. She’d forgotten how immediate and epic her hangovers were. People talked about this in AA—how your alcoholism continues to worsen even as you abstain, and if you do use again the effect is far worse than it was the last time.
My disease is in the basement, doing push-ups, Michelle had heard addicts say. And it was true. Two days taking Vicodin as directed, only altering her diet for maximum high, and she was still fragile and teary a week later. She shared her insight with Quinn.
Alcoholism is not a disease, Quinn argued.
It’s Been Proven, Michelle said. By Science. A Million Times Over.
Really? Quinn asked skeptically. Really? Because I don’t think that is true. I don’t think science has all the answers. Quinn was also against therapy and the entire concept of healing. It was ridiculous for Michelle—whose days were divided between AA meetings, Al-Anon meetings, meditation at the Zen Center, the elliptical machine at 24-Hour Fitness, and sessions with a therapist—to date this person.
Wait, I’m really confused. Quinn felt a rising panic as she sat there on the carpet of Michelle’s studio apartment. What do you mean we haven’t met? An existential chill ran through the girl. It felt true. Something about this whole connection had felt otherworldly, like Quinn was experiencing everything through a shallow pool of water. Life wavered. She’d thought it was the drugs.
This Is A Story, Michelle gestured at the studio apartment. It was a bleak place enlivened by the brutal constancy of the Southern California sunshine. Michelle had decided against wearing a visor or carrying a sun umbrella. No matter how deadly its rays, the sun always cheered Michelle. It made the spotty white walls of her new studio less depressing. The hard plank of carpet. The sag of the futon on the floor. The strange parade of end-time insects doing their last waltz underneath the kitchen sink.
This, Michelle told Quinn, Is My Memoir.
Memoirs are true, Quinn, also a writer, pointed out.
This One Is Part True And Part False. All That Stuff I Just Said, About When We Dated, Is True.
God, Quinn said. It doesn’t make me look very good. Did I tell you you could write about me?
No, Michelle said, But You Didn’t Tell Me I Couldn’t. The Person I Really Came To Los Angeles With Is Lucretia. I Actually Wrote The Whole Book With Her In It. Our Whole Story. Eight Years, Five Hundred Pages.
Quinn whistled through her teeth. Eight years! The slam poet from the first part of the book? You were with her for eight years?
I Know, Michelle said. It Was Really Complicated. She Didn’t Want Me To Write About Her But Our Breakup Was So Shitty And Awful I Just Really Needed To Tell The Story. You Know How A Story Needs To Get Told?
Quinn did. It was one of the reasons Michelle brought her into the book. Quinn was a poet and knew the feeling of writing bubbling up inside her, like a pot coming to boil. You lunge for a pen before it goes away. You have to capture it. If you let it come, it just pours out. Five hundred pages.
At a bookstore in New York City in the year 2011, more than a decade after the world ends in Black Wave, Michelle stood before a microphone and read from that five-hundred-page memoir novel. She read about being there in that very apartment. How it had smelled strongly of the dish soap they used, yellow, purchased at the dollar store. Michelle and Lu had both been delighted to find that all items in the dollar store really were only a dollar. Dollar dinner plates painted with tulips. Dollar juice glasses with elephants and bumble bees. They brought these items back to this little kitchen in Los Angeles and placed them inside the built-in cabinets, at least in the ones that weren’t painted shut with gobs of white paint.
In the story she read, Michelle tries to make Lu a bowl of beans. She adds corn and grates cheese into it, she seasons it with cumin and chili powder. All the while Lu is terribly mean to her. Lu has very low blood sugar. She can’t find a job because she looks like both a boy and a girl and this makes people uncomfortable, so they tell her they are not hiring even though there are NOW HIRING signs hung all over the place. This makes Lu feel insane. She fights with Michelle, who is only trying to help, until Michelle collapses on the linoleum floor.
Like This, Michelle shows Quinn. They’re in the kitchen in Los Angeles. Michelle beats her fists against the floor, then lets her forehead come to rest upon it. Her shoulders shake and heave as if she is sobbing. She raises her head.
Imagine There Are Little Bits Of Saucy Beans Splattered Around Me, Michelle guides her. Because I Just Threw The Wooden Spoon.
Eventually, Lu takes over and cooks the beans and they eat together. Michelle sobs through dinner. She is not yet on psychiatric medication and so once she starts to cry she cannot stop until she retires for the night. She is also not yet sober, so she spends almost every night getting drunk in the kitchen, alone, while Lu tries to sleep, the kitchen light shining on her head. Michelle fills the kitchen with cigarette smoke. Lu is nineteen and Michelle is twenty-eight.
After the New York reading, Michelle and Lu had a tremendous fight in front of the beverage table at a party. At the end of the fight, Michelle agreed to remove Lu from the book. It just wasn’t worth it. It kept Lu close to her, she realized, when they had been separate for so long, four years. If the book was ever published she’d have to talk about Lu all the time, what a horror. An
d it was bad for their respective romantic lives, keeping them linked in this way. At the end of the fight they felt closer, like comrades, and Michelle realized with a sick feeling that this was the same mechanism that had kept them together as lovers all those years. She returned from her trip and deleted Lucretia from the manuscript.
Sometimes It Feels Like A Mental Illness, Michelle said to Quinn. They were seated on the kitchen floor, relaxing against the cabinets. Their knees bumped together in a friendly fashion. Being A Writer. Being This Kind Of Writer. It Feels Compulsive. I Get Sweaty. I Wish I Was A Painter. I Wish The Story Came Out In An Image Of Like A Rotting Eggplant. A Dark, Swirly Rotting Eggplant With Really Thick Ridges Of Oil Paint That Take Months To Dry. And I Could Point At It And Say—That Is Lucretia. That Was Our Relationship. I Could Paint A Cigarette-Smoking Corgi In A Visor And Name The Painting Mother. That Would Be Awesome. But It’s Not What I Do. I Write Five-Hundred-Page Books About My Life And Then Have To Remove The Main Story Line So People Don’t Think Someone Was A Jerk For Being A Jerk.
Well, I bet you were a jerk too, Quinn said. I mean, so far in this story you’ve been pretty unsympathetic.
Thanks, Michelle said. I’ve Really Tried. I Just Wanted To Write About What Happens To Your Heart And Your Mind When You’re In An Oppressive Relationship. I Wanted To Try To Understand How People Stay In Shitty Situations, The Weird Head Fuck Of Love And Anxiety. It’s Like Being Electrocuted, It Makes You Cling To The Very Thing Hurting You.
Ooh, that’s a good metaphor, Quinn said. Why don’t you just write a poem about it? No one ever really understands what a poem is about. You could hide all kinds of complaints in there.
