Michelle Tea - Black Wave

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.