Michelle Tea - Black Wave

In her bed Andy took an inventory of invaders. She should have thrown a net over Michelle and cast her out. She should have smacked her with a spatula and left her for her roommates to deal with. She was like one of those long, crackled bugs that had evolved to look like sticks and leaves. Michelle had evolved to look like a normal girl, one capable of love and loyalty, one able to assist in the creation of a stable relationship, one that promoted good cheer and a feeling of safety. She had seemed true. Those last weeks had been so sweet, with popcorn in bed, the television pulled close. Watching the Westminster Dog Show, listening to doll-clutching Marilyn Manson fans defend their facial piercings on The Jenny Jones Show , getting caught up in a lurid movie on Lifetime. Andy had thought this one thing was happening, but in fact this other thing was happening. Michelle was lying in wait like a predator. She had colonized Andy’s nest and Andy had unwittingly fed her, mistook her for one of her own. Now she had found a fucking teenager? She was gross. Tears shot from the sides of Andy’s eyes and slid into her ears. From her windows she could see the planes in their holding patterns above SFO. Bright lights shining in the sky, just sitting there, not moving.

In the afternoon Andy came to Michelle’s house. Michelle would not let her inside because Lucretia was up there, in her bed. She stood with Andy outside on Fourteenth Street. She was barefoot on the disgusting ground, in a thrifted Garfield nightshirt that read AQUARIUS. Why are you in your pajamas? Andy asked skeptically. It’s like three o’clock.

It’s Healthier, Sleeping In The Day, Michelle bluffed. Then: I Was Up Late.

Up late snorting watery heroin with Lu, but she omitted that part. After the bar had closed, despairing that she had not thought ahead and run to the liquor store for after-hours alcohol, Michelle had whined, and Lucretia had suggested copping a bag off one of the gentlemen entrepreneurs who offered Coca, Chiva, Outfits as you passed them on the corner of Sixteenth and Mission. Michelle had never done heroin before — it seemed the time to try such an obvious and stupid drug had passed. On the other hand, it had never been offered to Michelle and so she’d never had the opportunity, and she was drunk and the night was so bright with the street lights and the shop lights and the cars shooting beams from their eyes and the cocaine was electric inside her and Lu’s kiss had unhinged her and she had already broken Andy’s heart again — if now wasn’t the time to try heroin, then when?

Michelle made the youngster make the purchase while she waited across the street, leaning against the wrought-iron fence that kept a trailer park school protected from the daily chaos of that intersection. How terrible to go to school in a ring of trailers on the corner of Sixteenth and Mission, where homeless crackheads breeched the fence to sleep and piss and puke and screw on the patch of dead grass and trash ringing the schoolyard. Michelle wondered if it was a school for children who’d killed their parents, she hoped these kids had done something terrible enough to deserve such a bleak learning environment.

Lucretia returned with the drugs. Thanks, Michelle said, Thanks For Understanding. Michelle could not accompany the teen to buy the narcotics because she could not be seen doing such a thing. She couldn’t get arrested, she was an adult.

Yeah, I’m an adult too, I’m eighteen, Lucretia said.

Yeah, But That’s Hardly An Adult, They’d Let You Off, Michelle said.

The youth laughed. What are you talking about? I have two friends in jail for drugs.

Hmmph, Michelle said. She just didn’t think a teen slam poet would be arrested. Someone would come to her aid, right? Besides, there was the matter of Michelle’s reputation. She was a writer. Not many people had read her book, but all those who lived in her neighborhood had. She was given a kindly regard. Yes, she was a little messy but she couldn’t be too far gone if she made it to her shift each day at the bookstore, if she’d managed to write an actual book while still in her twenties, if she managed to pen an article here and there for the local weekly. Why, that was more than some people did in their whole lifetime! Also, Michelle could not buy heroin on Mission Street, for then these drug dealers who harassed her daily would never stop, they would think they knew her, and Michelle would be mortified. The whole thing was too trashy even for her. Her attitude toward heroin was like her attitude toward hot dogs: she didn’t want to see where they came from, she just wanted to eat them in the privacy of her own home while sick with PMS. And so Lu returned with the drugs, and the pair retired to Michelle’s bedroom where the sticky brown nugget was dissolved in a tablespoon of water, the impurities burned away, and then sucked down the back of their throats with the tubes of hacked and gutted pens.

Unlike the barfelonius crack, Michelle liked the heroin. It made her feel princessy and submissive. It was like liquefied sex splashing down the back of her throat. Not any sort of sex, but a creepy kind Michelle liked to imagine alone at night, fantasies of kidnap and poison and molestation. The drug sluiced into that place inside her. A tuning fork was struck inside her psyche. She laid her head, swarming and sick, on Lucretia’s lap, dreaming that she was a runaway thirteen-year-old and that Lu — deftly fixing her own hit with one hand while keeping the other warmly on Michelle’s head — was the creep who picked her up at a bus station. It was all darkness, the drugs and the dreams they loosened, but Michelle was enchanted, suspended in a dark water. Lucretia, a teenager, a stranger, her hand on Michelle’s head, felt like a message from God. This is love. The drugs swamped her. This is love. God, all Michelle ever wanted was love, and it had been so close all along, right at Sixteenth and Mission, tucked into the grimy pockets of the Coca, Chiva, Outfits man.

In the sex they had — lazy and hard, slow-motion, invasive — Michelle found new possibilities inside her body, gasping into the teen’s mouth, the drug removing all resistance to anything, everything. This is love. They did it for a while, seeing how close they could come to breaking Michelle, and then they fell into a slumberless sleep of floating images and waking hallucinations. At some point Michelle began to cry. This was not unusual — Michelle cried all the time, she had some kind of crying problem, she always had, her moms had called her Waterworks as a child. They’d had to, to not laugh about her sadness would have meant they’d have to take it seriously and to take seriously a little girl who cried all the time was too disturbing. What was Michelle feeling when she cried beside the teen, who was locked in her own dreamtime? She had opened herself so wide and now she was alone. She had felt swells of love but understood, as time spiraled around her, that it was not love. She was a chemical disaster. And what about Andy? Andy would really hate her now and Michelle would never find another girl like Andy ever again, someone who would not do heroin with her, someone who fed her pancakes and pork chops. Michelle could see the sun rising above the overpass outside her window and she was certain, finally, that her life was out of control. She cried.

On the sidewalk in her Garfield nightie Michelle crouched beside a parking meter and threw up. What is wrong with you? Andy demanded with disgust and alarm. She noted the puff of Michelle’s eyelids. It’s what happened when she cried, like she was allergic to her own tears. Her face would swell up red and bulbous, she looked like a whole other girl. Michelle was terribly vain about it. She hated being ugly and she hated being weak. She hated the proof of her emotional instability sitting on her face. The swelling took forever to go down, she applied various remedies to the salted wound of her face. She kept tablespoons in the freezer, would place their rounded bottoms on her eyelids, but the cold only made them tear. She kept chamomile tea bags soaking in the fridge. She kept cucumbers handy and would layer her face in slices. At a beauty store she selected a product with raspberry extract that promised to reduce eye puffiness. Michelle was shocked at how many beauty products were marketed as balm for swollen eyes. She imagined thousands of female consumers sobbing hysterically all night and acting like there was totally no problem by day, smearing creams into their haggard faces at the bathroom mirror. She was part of a demographic.