Michelle Tea: Black Wave

Stitch, Michelle’s housemate, was also swapping more dangerous addictions for controlled alcoholism and the occasional cocaine indulgence. A few years back, she had transitioned from femme to butch and became everyone’s project. Established butches made donations of well-worn Jack Daniel’s T-shirts. Older femmes groomed her to their liking, gifting her with outsized belt buckles and other late-nineties accessories.

The two butches played pool with the ex-con while Michelle, who hated pool, hung around sipping drinks and watching the sun go down outside the bar’s open door. The hue of the sky was the visual equivalent of the alcohol settling into her body — dusky blue shot with gold and darkening to navy. San Francisco, like many cities, had become a vampire town. The killer sun charged the pollution in the skies into a smoggy cocktail. By day, people darted from shelter to shelter like roaches stunned by sudden light, visors like riot gear shading their faces, SARS masks strung across their jaws, parasols arcing above their melanoma-spotted heads. Places of commerce opened later and later. Business visionaries inverted the workday. It was predicted that by 2010, nine-to-five would be fully replaced by five-to-nine. If everything lasted that long.

Michelle had arrived at the bar at sunset, still sleepy. The first rush of booze perked her up, the sugar infusing her with a pleasant mania before it released her into that darker, confused place where her mind became a sea that consciousness bobbed about on, rolling with the waves of passion and opinion.

Just then, a marauding band of already-drunk yuppies crashed into the bar and made a flamboyant fuss over the ex-convict’s inky teardrop tattoo— Oh my god were you in JAIL did you KILL someone? As they swarmed him, Michelle and her friends were there to tell them to back the fuck off. The three of them were just drunk enough to enjoy a righteous fight, all were perpetually pissed about the changes the neighborhood was experiencing. All three knew someone who was now making thousands of dollars playing foosball and drinking energy drinks in the break room of an Internet start-up, and all three knew someone who’d been evicted from their home to make room for a foosball-playing young millionaire. Ziggy, on the verge of eviction for months now, had sabotaged the sale of her home once already by running around the apartment half-naked with a dildo strapped to her hips when a speculative realtor came calling.

What, the gang demanded of these offensive yuppies, were they even doing in the queer bar? Were they even queer? The invaders wobbled over to the corner of the bar to regroup, and Ziggy, who spoke some shitty Spanish, asked the man with the tattoo if he could find them cocaine. He could. The trio stormed out of the bar. Michelle wondered briefly if it was a good idea for the man, only just released from prison, to be sourcing illegal drugs for a passel of queer white girls, but decided to go with the flow. It would be an experience, and Michelle was a writer.

As they cruised the Mission in Ziggy’s beat-up molester van — the windows blackened, the doors warped as if gangs of kidnapped children had tried to batter their way out — Michelle felt proud that she and her friends knew the proper and respectful way to hang out with a recent ex-convict with a teardrop tattooed on his face. The world was bigger than it had been ten minutes ago, a rabbit hole into which they could all tumble. The man was very good-looking, with a prison-yard physique, short hair, and a sort of humility. He hopped from the van on Capp Street and returned with his fist clenched around the drugs. He opened his palm.

No! Ziggy exclaimed. Coca, coca! She shook her orangey head at the substance he’d procured. This is crack. She laughed, a rueful snort. Ziggy wore a pair of goggles with lenses the same shade as her hair. She wore them strapped to her skull, just above her forehead, keeping her Kurt Cobain bob out of her face. It was like a butch headband. Ziggy’s teeth were so bad from her poverty and drug use they tumbled about in her mouth like a handful of chipped marbles. I love crack , she said sadly, and piloted the van to an empty lot in Hayes Valley, stopping briefly to purchase a special pipe off a lady crackhead on Mission. Michelle wondered for a second if there were diseases to be caught from the burned glass pipe of a career crackhead, but she had learned that fearful questions in such situations could lead to racism, to classism, to all sorts of unevolved and judgmental states of mind, and so one did not think too hard. One just accepted the chipped pipe with its charred bowl and one inhaled. And then one slid open the van door and puked onto the pavement, because crack is repulsive.

Outside the van, vines threaded themselves lushly through a chain-link fence and the parked cars sat soft, reflecting soft streetlights. It was 1999 and the earth’s decline was accelerating. Most native plants and trees were gone, leaving hardier invasive species. This one had leaves like wide, flat elephant ears, their green sheened with gloss. It had no business growing in San Francisco, but Michelle, hungry for green, appreciated it. Kids growing up now wouldn’t know any better, but Michelle had been raised among oak trees and maples, linden trees that perfumed summer nights. The town that had borne her was a shitty one, but back then even a shitty town had trees. Now even nice neighborhoods barely had a garden.

Michelle was too drunk to feel a single inhalation of crack. She leaned back in the van and watched Ziggy and Stitch fight over it — like, who was holding the pipe too long, who was owed their next hit, who had dropped a crumble of rock into the van’s carpeted shag and needed to fucking find it, now . Michelle had indulged in drugs with her friends many times and never had she seen such fiendish behavior. It was disturbing to see them acting like such dopeheads. Then Ziggy and Stitch began fooling around with the ex-con. They took turns making out with him. He was cute enough, and Michelle knew how it was to be all fucked up with no one to make out with. Ziggy and Stitch weren’t going to make out with each other — that would be gross. Michelle would be gross as well, maybe grosser. They were family. With his face stuck to Ziggy’s, the man’s hand slithered over and landed on Michelle’s leg, only to be smacked off by Stitch. Not her , Stitch snapped.

He gave Michelle a sincere apology, the inky tear suspended beneath his hangdog eyeball, and returned to Ziggy. He had only wanted Michelle to feel included, but Michelle wasn’t butch enough to mess around with men. It would be simply heterosexual, and slutty. For Ziggy and Stitch it was something else, proof of their toughness. They could tumble around with this guy and emerge from the van as queer as ever, more queer, even, and the man might now in fact be a bit queer from his time spent cracked out in Ziggy’s butch bosom. Ziggy smacked the man lightly in his face and they both smiled. Radical was the order of the day and it was not radical for Michelle, with her normal girly gender, to fool around with a guy. It would be a normal, boring, sell-out thing to do. But Ziggy and Stitch, both of them looking, acting, dressing, and smelling like boys, could do anything they wanted and be radical. They brought their radicalness into every situation and radicalized it with their presence.

Michelle caught a ghost of her reflection in the dark van window — blue hair, a bit fried from the effort. Bangs fringed her forehead, uneven, hacked off at home with a dull pair of scissors. Her kelly-green pleather coat was one of Stitch’s femme castoffs. She wore an orange slip as a dress, the tucks in the chest stitched for a woman more voluptuous than she. Its lacy neckline ballooned around her scrawny sternum. Alcohol bloat plumped her cheeks. A leopard scarf was knotted around her throat. She wore motorcycle boots on her feet, so heavy, every step demonstrating gravity. It was the end of the century.