Michelle Tea - Black Wave

I Don’t!

That’s pretty cool, Quinn said, and a slight shyness came about them like a vapor.

I’ll Pay For The Heroin But You Have To Buy It, Michelle instructed. I’ll Show You Where, I’ll Show You Who.

What do I say? How do I ask for it? The being seemed delighted by this turn of events. Michelle could tell they’d be a true adventurer.

I’ll Tell You Everything, Michelle said. She left with the being, not even bothering to say goodbye to Ziggy or Stitch.

At home at her desk Michelle chopped pens and dribbled water into a spoon and played PJ Harvey on her boom box. The being watched with muted interest, inhaled the liquid obediently, and followed Michelle to her futon. They had an intelligent face, something Virginia Woolf — ish about it, perhaps in the nose.

You know, they said, I met Lou Reed once and he told me I looked like a poet. So that’s so weird that you said that.

It’s Weird, Michelle said, And It’s Not. She was high enough to be in the space where all things are so deeply one, so nothing was really a surprise. And You Are A Poet, Right?

Of course, said Quinn.

Of Course. Michelle would have nodded if she could have moved her head, which was perfectly sunken into a perfect pillow. Of course Quinn was a poet, wrote by hand in a notebook forever tucked into a messenger bag, had the sort of literary vibrations Lou Reed would pick out of the air on a New York City street. Michelle felt proud of herself. Whatever Lou had seen in the being, she’d seen too. They shared a certain wavelength.

Why doesn’t everyone do it this way? Quinn asked, blissed out on their back on Michelle’s futon. Why even shoot it, this is so perfect, you couldn’t get it more perfect than this.

I Know, Michelle breathed. It seemed so desperate to shoot it, sort of American. Greedy. Vulgar. This way, you simply breathed. You inhaled water, like a mermaid. Michelle rolled over in such a way that if the being found her alluring it would be easy to take advantage of her.

I’m seeing things, Quinn said, their eyes gently shut. The poet’s face looked chiseled from a fine European marble. The eyes gently rolled the eyelids.

What, What? begged Michelle, who believed drugs were holy, connected you to the divine. This belief fell apart if you traced the drugs’ route to her bedroom — from poverty-stricken people to violent, bloody-handed drug lords, up the butts of people desperate enough to shove drugs up their butt and risk prison for the money, into the hands of more desperate or ruthless people here in her own country, finally making it into the streets of her city, cut with who knows what chemicals, sold by individuals trapped in the throes of their own addictions, individuals who had an arm, a leg, a chunk of their ass eaten away with abscesses and various flesh-eating bacteria. No matter! In the hands of lesser people drugs were a menace, but Michelle was a lover, a spiritual seeker. The drug’s moody wave washed over her as Quinn detailed their gentle hallucinations — violet, flashes of color.

It’s you, Quinn explained to Michelle, You are the violet. This delighted Michelle, who felt crucially seen for the first time in her life. Not seen by dates who’d known she was cute or liked her writing, or by girlfriends who saw her lack of fidelity, her shallowness, her mania. Seen by a stranger whose drug-addled mind beheld her mystical reality. She was violet! She always knew she was special. The drug dropped her down a well of deep love for this genderless, many-gendered being, this Quinn.

Who Are You? she asked. How Come I’ve Never Seen You Before?

I’m married, said the being. I don’t come out much. I stay inside watching The X-Files with my husband.

You’re Married To A Man? Michelle asked, and Quinn nodded before realizing she had revealed her gender.

Oh! she cried, and brought a hand up to her face weakly. Her hands were carved from ivory tusks, glorious animals had died so that Quinn could have those hands, elegantly enormous, veined like cocks, slender and powerful and promising of thrall.

Fearing that the being would lie there blissing out on her violet visions forever, Michelle completed her roll, butting up against Quinn like an animal brought to shore by a persistent current. She brought her lips over and Quinn kissed her back and it was soft soft soft like a dreamtime enchanted forest and they were two children dropped down into a fairy ring. Oh my god, Michelle thought, I think we’re making love. It was a term everyone barfed at. No one wanted to make love, people wanted to fuck, to rake each other’s skin apart with knives and pin it back together with needles. But the tenderness thrilled Michelle and she reconsidered the phrase: making love. It so repulsed Stitch that when forced to she used the abbreviated ML. But Michelle loved love. Heroin was love, the generic of love, what you got if you couldn’t afford the original. The approximation was fine by Michelle. It was a wonderful mimic. Michelle and this being were in love and when they brought their bodies together they made even more love. It was pretty awesome. And then Quinn took the formidable length of her body and used it to subdue Michelle, easily, for Michelle was such a shrimp and so deliciously weakened by the drug. Powerless beneath her lover’s crushing physique she struggled lightly, enough to rouse the being, who stilled her with her jaw like a mother cat hushing a kitten. Michelle’s wiggles calmed and from her mouth came teasing, doped-up whimpers. The being slid her hand deftly into Michelle’s underwear and asked, You like to get fucked, huh? and it was on.

Then the van got stolen. There was a dizzying minute when Michelle spun around the empty parking spot, discombobulated. She’d moved it, hadn’t she? She had left it right there, yes, yes. She reeled, looking at the landmarks. Near the free clinic where she had gotten her most recent HIV test. Near the discount grocery store with the intense lighting, where that food riot had happened a few months ago. Right there. And it wasn’t. It wasn’t there. Michelle stood hapless and blinking, waiting for it to tool around the corner, a cartoon van with winking eyes where its headlights should be. Just kidding! It would honk its weak little honk. That didn’t happen.

The sun skulked lower in the sky, then lower still. The bastard sun had shone upon the thievery, done nothing to stop it. Stolen in broad daylight! The insult of it. As if she had been doubly tricked, as if she should have been able to stop it simply because she had been awake. But Michelle had been at work, at the bookstore. Hanging out in the Self-Help section. She liked to read books about alcoholism and personality disorders to assure herself that neither was a problem in her life. When she finished pretending to organize Self-Help she moved over to New Age and consoled herself with astrology books. Aquarians weren’t really prone to addiction, that was more Scorpio’s jam. Sagittarians could also get out of hand, Cuidado, Ziggy! Michelle felt better already.

That afternoon Michelle walked sadly through the Mission. The day’s smog was a thin gas in the air, growing weaker with the sun’s disappearance. There was that smell in the air all the time, the tinny stink of environmental collapse. The fog clung to Michelle’s glasses and wouldn’t come off, her view of life perpetually smeared. She decided to get sushi. We Be was empty, she sat in the window and gazed out the mucky glass. What will I do? Michelle thought. Police report. She remembered when carrots were more plentiful, how they would be gratis in a little glass cup on the tables. Michelle didn’t care about vegetables but missed the orange cheer of them. The walls of the sushi restaurant were marked with broad X s over fish that had gone extinct. Michelle ordered a cucumber roll and a bowl of rice.