Michelle Tea: Black Wave

Any flicker of fidelity to Andy was sucked from her throat. Lucretia kissed Michelle like she was in love with her already. She kissed her like she’d been shipwrecked on an island, notching each stranded day onto a fallen coconut, slowly losing her mind. She filled Michelle like weather, worked her mouth like a cherry stem being tongued into a knot. Michelle had nevernevernever been kissed like this. Michelle had always thought that kissing was like coming upon a golden trunk lodged in the ocean floor. She tried to tug it open but never could, and this was okay because she still beheld the luminous trunk in all its splendor. But Lucretia knocked the chest right open. With one wrenching motion Michelle’s sea was full of coins and rubies, strands of pearls floating like fish in the waters. The clichés of physical love were suddenly available to her. Her knees were weak. She was seeing fireworks. She had butterflies in her stomach. It didn’t occur to her that it might be the cocaine.

Michelle barely recalled phoning Andy. She had the blurriest memory of bumming coins off someone to use the pay phone. No one but yuppies had cell phones then, yuppies and, inexplicably, Ziggy, though she would often lose hers while drunk. Cradling the heavy black receiver that stank like beer breath, Michelle told Andy she’d made out with someone, a teenager. Andy’s hurt was a cloud on the other end of the line, one that picked up energy, velocity, and humidity as the clock ticked on Michelle’s quarter. But between the liquor and the kiss, Michelle felt anesthetized to Andy’s pain.

I’m Going Home With Her, she told her girlfriend. Andy could hear the slur of Michelle’s slow-mo lips forming the words.

Michelle, Andy said. Should she be angry or tragic? Manipulative or permissive? Cry, yell, guilt, act like she didn’t fucking care, should she just end this relationship once and for all? The thought of getting back on the non-monogamy roller coaster sickened her, and the realization that she had never actually gotten off, that the calm between Linda and this moment had simply been a mellower part of the ride, made her feel sicker still.

You’re like a butterfly, Andy had once flattered Michelle in the midst of an affair. She’d been working toward viewing Michelle as an ethereal, liberated creature, something with wings, something whose freedom she, Andy, was charged with protecting. It had worked for about five minutes. Indeed, Michelle seemed more like some sort of compulsively rutting land mammal, a chimera of dog in heat and black widow, a sex fiend that kills its mate. Or else she was merely a sociopath. She was like the android from Blade Runner who didn’t know it was bad to torture a tortoise. She had flipped Andy onto her belly in the Armageddon sun and left her there, fins flapping.

The quarter ran out and Andy held a dead line in her hand. She lay back in her bed but she did not sleep. She thought of the occasional feral creature that crawled into her house, a converted basement apartment cut into the side of Bernal Hill. Animals sometimes came through her open window. Once a tomcat with enormous balls rocking between his back legs and a stunned bird in his mouth sauntered in. Andy shooed the tomcat back onto the hillside and used her bedsheet to net the bird flying crookedly around the apartment. Birds were increasingly rare in the dead wildness of Bernal, the neighborhood had become a sort of petrified forest. Andy brought the bundle into her yard, feeling the bird flutter weakly inside the sheet. She unveiled the animal to the night sky with a flourish, like a magician releasing conjured doves. Andy’s heart tilted in her chest as she watched the crazed thing loop and smack into the side of the house. It landed with a feathery thwaaap! and Andy went back into her basement. She did not want to know if it had collected itself back into the air or not. It looked like a cowbird anyway. A parasitic nonnative. The moms dumped their eggs into nests of native birds, leaving them there to be raised by the adoptive parents. The cowbirds were bigger and bossier and commanded all the food, and so the native babies starved. There was once a huge cowbird population on the hill, but even they were becoming scarce as the other birds died away, leaving no one for the invaders to con food out of. It depressed Andy.

Another time Andy came upon not one but two Jerusalem crickets in her bathroom. They were large as frogs and humanoid, with jointed appendages and heads with little eyeballs. They seemed to have skin and it seemed to be greasy. The sight of them made Andy throw up in her mouth. They looked like nothing she had ever seen before, except maybe in B movies from the sixties where space aliens were imagined as giant bugs. She stunned them with a spatula and flipped them into a Tupperware container. She wrapped the bowl in duct tape and drove it to Michelle’s house.

Michelle’s roommate Stitch loved insects, especially the cockroaches that infested their home. She thwarted her roommates’ lazy attempts at fumigation, allowing only a nonviolent sonar gadget someone purchased on a late-night Home Shopping Network binge. You plugged the gadget into the wall and it emitted roach-repelling waves. It didn’t work. In fact, Michelle found a tiny bug stuck in its vents, seemingly drawn to the sonar. Maybe it was the equivalent of heavy metal for roaches, some enjoyed it.

Stitch believed that at this late date in the history of the earth, with more species extinct than alive, humans had to drop their preferences regarding the natural world. San Francisco used to have pumas. There had been occasional whales in its waters. Now even the butterflies were gone. They had roaches and feral cats and gangs of abandoned dogs patrolling the outskirts of town, all evolving a tolerance for the rancid bay water. They had invasive species. Burly lionfish menaced the ocean, trash speared on their venomous quills, Mad Maxes of the sea. Scavenging green crabs cannibalized the last of the natives and took out the scallops as well. Soon even these barbarians would be gone. Pirate hermit crabs with no snails to raid secreted a glue from their back and papered themselves in Snickers wrappers and sea-worn chunks of Styrofoam.

Stitch was a Taurus. She felt the damage of the natural world in some deep place inside her. She was not separate from the stinging South American ants burrowing through the backyard dirt, sculpting conical hives. Not separate from the abandoned canines living in trash caves in the Bayview. Not separate from the roaches scurrying through her kitchen each night. Their home was supporting life! That seemed crucial to Stitch, radical even, and she believed it was only a matter of time before ecopeople woke up and began championing the species they were currently scapegoating. Better invading Asian citrus beetles than no beetles at all.

Look, Stitch would point at a roach couple brazenly mating atop the microwave. They’re having sex!

They’re Making More Roaches! Michelle shrieked.

Exactly, Stitch gloated, proud that her laboratory was thriving. On a speed binge Stitch dripped globs of glow-in-the-dark paint on all the kitchen roaches and the nighttime result was breathtaking, grotesque, and psychedelic. Like a child mad scientist, Stitch had created phosphorescent cockroaches. It did work to strip the bugs of some of their ickiness and the roommates began to laugh when they came upon them, rather than shriek. Except for the time Michelle was curling up to sleep on her futon and felt something tumble from her wild, dry mane and onto her cheek. She shook it onto her pillow and screamed at the poster-paint radiance glowing atop the pillowcase.

Andy had left the Jerusalem crickets with Stitch, who had doted on them. She’d lowered their broken bodies into a terrarium and watched them die on the kitchen table — they had suffered internal damage when Andy whacked them with the spatula. Stitch kept a vigil beside them as they slowly left their bodies, a Buddhist priest ushering them to the Bardo. Their faces were uncannily human, maybe it was their wide eyes or how their heads seemed stacked on their necks. Their antennae were long and their skin seemed Caucasian. Stitch was encouraged to learn that a native bug species was apparently thriving in Bernal Hill. She hoped more would tunnel from the earth and back into Andy’s home. Stitch had never seen an insect so large and strikingly grotesque and wanted another shot at domesticating them in her plastic terrarium. But Andy knew that if she ever found one inside her home again she would have to move.