Michelle Tea - Black Wave

Michelle didn’t believe in perfection, in writing or anything else. Belief in perfection was a delusion that spawned mental illness. But she could capture the essence of a moment, the moment her mind conjured the words to document the scene — yes. This was writing to Michelle, but it was no longer allowed. Poor her! She would have to write fiction — real, actual fiction. She would have to write a screenplay. She didn’t want everyone hating her forever and she didn’t want to be a loser. She would have to move to Los Angeles.

Kyle was thrilled that Michelle was finally moving to Los Angeles. In two phone calls he secured for his sister a studio apartment in Hollywood. The studio was $400.

I’m so glad you’re not going to hang out in San Francisco forever, waiting to get evicted, Kyle clucked. News of the city’s dot-com upset was leaking out of San Francisco and into the nation. Rents in San Francisco were now officially more expensive than in Manhattan. People were charging $2,000 to sleep in a closet. High-paid Silicon Valley execs were spending the night riding buses, unable to find a vacant apartment. Strippers were coming from all over the country to dance in Bay Area strip clubs, collecting big tips from Internet nerds. The city was coming apart.

But Michelle had paid only $200 to live in her shab-by-chic room. And she was in no danger of being evicted. Her landlord lived right downstairs, a sad widower named Clovis who gave the household platters of supermarket cookies at Christmas. Michelle had learned that before the straight girls had occupied it, the flat had been a haven for fucked-up, dysfunctional lesbians. Ekundayo’s room had been a practice space for Tribe 8, the dyke punk band that performed topless and pulled dildos from their pants, goaded men from the crowd to fellate them, and then castrated themselves and flung the silicone into the audience. Man-hating lesbians who couldn’t cope with reality had lived there, pulling traveler’s-check scams, faking insanity to get on SSI. Roommates had pooled lists of ex-boyfriends and hustled them out of money for nonexistent abortions.

When she moved in, Michelle had had no idea that the house had been a magic castle of queerness with a secret outlaw history. It was as if the Dillinger Gang had hidden out there. A lesbian porn had been filmed in her bathroom! An infamous lesbian hooker had once lived in her bedroom, had nailed hardware into her floorboards to tie down her lovers! Michelle had restored the flat to its former glory, all rooms occupied with barely functioning lesbian alcoholics. And now she would leave.

But Michelle loved her bedroom. The floors were blue and the wall behind her lousy futon was also blue, and stuck with chunky glitter. Three windows looked out on the street below, where a stolen car ring operated out of a garage. The dismantled alarms wailed all night, but Michelle was used to it. Gauzy thrift-store curtains hung in the windows, tied back with Mylar ribbons. A giant bullhorn mounted on a piece of rotting wood dangled in the center window. Michelle had found it on the street, the source of so many unexpected treasures. The ocean of poverty pulled many gifts to shore. Stolen luggage was often gutted on the sidewalk, and Michelle was not above rummaging the contents. She’d found velvety platform shoes, satiny gowns, chipped knickknacks. It was okay that she didn’t have money to shop ever because the streets provided her with such hunter-gatherer thrills.

Michelle had loved her room so long, had lived inside it seven years, and now could feel herself being pushed out from it. It wasn’t the economy. Clovis the Landlord had promised he would not raise the rent and he had no intention of selling the house. The man spent his lonely nights singing into his personal karaoke machine in the flat downstairs. The sound of him singing Sammy Davis Jr., his warbling voice floating up through the floorboards, broke everyone’s heart. Everyone in the punk house loved their landlord. It was okay that the shower, a metal closet, was rusting through the bottom, surely harboring gangrene and soaking the house in soggy rot — Clovis’s second-floor apartment was in no better shape. If he had the money he’d fix their shower, but to get the money he would have to raise their rent, and so they put a milk crate in the shower to stand above the jagged rust and wore flip-flops while they bathed, just in case.

When the word got out that Michelle was moving everyone assumed she was getting evicted. When she told them she was not, she was just vacating her $200-a-month room in the Mission by choice, everyone was baffled. Why would anyone do such a thing? To move to Los Angeles, that shit hole? Hers was surely the last room in town renting for under $800. Once she left the Bay Area she could never come back. She could never afford it. She was evicting herself, it was crazy. But the city had bad vibes and they’d infected her. Michelle hardly ever saw the sun anymore, sleeping until her evening shift at the bookstore loomed. Her boss had asked her if she had lost weight or if she had just started to wear tighter clothes. The answer was both. Michelle was beginning to look like a Ramone. At night she began to dream that her room was haunted and the spirits wanted her dead. She had gone as far as she could in San Francisco. She would move to Los Angeles and write screenplays.

A problem with Michelle’s plan to move to Los Angeles was that technically she did not drive. She’d been taught, briefly, years ago, by an old girlfriend and she hadn’t felt incompetent. She’d enjoyed tooling around in the car under supervision, getting praised for how well she drove. She’d intended to make it legal, go to the DMV and get a license, but Michelle was so lazy and there were always other things to do, like drink and sleep and go to the bookstore. The DMV was in the Panhandle, wherever that was. Michelle didn’t really leave the Mission. In a burst of can-do responsibility, she figured out the bus route to the office and arrived early one morning, prepared to spend the afternoon. But the woman at the counter turned her away quickly.

No more, she shook her head. No more driver’s licenses.

What? Michelle had expected bureaucracy, hassles, annoyances — it was the DMV. A person didn’t have to drive to know that — but she hadn’t anticipated this.

No more licenses till 2000. January and July there will be a lottery if you want to enter your name.

You Stopped Giving Driver’s Licenses? Since When?

January this year. The lady was bored.

How Was I Supposed To Know That? Michelle felt outraged. Driving was a right, right? So she put it off for about a decade, so what? It was still her right, wasn’t it?

It was in the news. The woman spoke to Michelle as if she were a dummy. It went into effect in San Francisco on January first, and in the state of California last month. No new driver’s licenses. Not enough gas, you know?

The woman looked tired. She was Latina, her hair was in a claw at the nape of her neck, she wore gold hoop earrings and a little cross on her clavicle. I’m lucky to still be here, they laid off half the office. It was creepily quiet. A few people were renewing their licenses. Outside the windows was a patch of barren soil. The natives had died and the landscapers had tugged out all the invasive species and so there was just dirt.

Michelle left. She didn’t take the bus, she walked. The Panhandle, the long park that ran into the frying pan of Golden Gate Park, was lined with trees in various death states. Some had been eaten from the inside out by invading beetles and some of those had been burned to stumps in an attempt to stop the outbreak. Some were starved of water by the drought and some of those were so shriveled they had toppled over and smashed like plaster. Others were strangled by kudzu and Michelle at least appreciated the green gloss of their leaves. She hurried back to the Mission, which never had much wildlife in the first place and so was not as depressing as these doomed, once-green neighborhoods.