Michelle Tea - Black Wave

Michelle and Quinn left the bedroom, moved past the trash pile and down the stairs. A gigantic heap of garbage sat at the very top of Michelle’s staircase, where feng shui tradition suggested you place an altar to welcome guests and purify outside energies. It had been accumulating there for nearly a year. At first it had been a couple items too cumbersome to place into the trash cans, objects waiting to be left by the curb on Big Trash Night. But no one knew when Big Trash Night was scheduled and no one took up the task of finding out, and so the junk lingered, was joined by more junk, growing until it looked like an art installation, a pyramid of bulging, shiny trash bags, alien pods cocooning new life. In a perverse way Michelle supposed it was a feng shui altar for their era. If nature had mostly been replaced by garbage than wouldn’t a “natural” altar be sort of phony, nostalgic even? The trash pile evoked the shores of Ocean Beach, where the tide brought industrial wreckage on the sand with the blind generosity of a pet cat leaving a kill on your pillow. The ocean wanted only to give and had been wrecked of its ability to bring anything but regurgitated garbage. Michelle thought everyone should live with a giant trash heap in their homes. They deserved it.

Quinn gave a short glance at the cop and felt her empty belly rumble with hunger and dread. She’d thrown up some pizza last night after the drugs had hit her, that was the hunger. The dread was, well, the cop was bound to mistake her for a boy. Quinn would either have to correct his mistake or sit there, anxiously waiting for the dude to figure it out. The anticipation would be agonizing. If the cop caught his blunder he’d feel played and betrayed and it would be left to Quinn to comfort him. The cop would resent Quinn for being so gender ambiguous — it wasn’t his fault, anyone would mistake her for a man, look at her, why does she look like that if she doesn’t want to be a man anyway, this fucking city, I’m getting transferred to Vallejo.

Quinn’s gender confusion studded each day with potential land mines. Who knew what would happen? Public bathrooms were famously traumatizing, even in San Francisco. Queers stuck to their bubbles for a reason, the outside world was hostile. But the cop hadn’t paid her much attention since the initial bro-down head-nod. Quinn was passing. She settled into a morning of maleness.

Without even looking at Quinn, Michelle knew what was happening. Like all females Michelle was codependent, but in femmes codependency could become so sharp, so intense, that it reached psychic proportions. She could feel the atmospheric conditions that produced a gender meltdown, the currents spun her like a weather vane. She hoped her normative gender could somehow smooth the spiky vibrations. She would fill the small space of the squad car with classic female cheer. She would twinkle like a little star. A little, scrawny, strung-out rattlesnake star.

Michelle wished the public understood the extent gender deviation was punished in their culture. Her wish was naive, Aquarian — who did she think was punishing gender deviation, if not the public? Still, she dreamed of a Black Like Me experiment, something like the MTV show that put a bunch of skinny morons in fat suits and sent them out into the world to cry. People are so mean to fat people! was the tearful conclusion. Michelle loved reality shows that punked the ignorant into feeling compassion. It affirmed her belief that humanity was inherently kind. It just sometimes took a production crew and public humiliation to shock the heart into opening. She wondered if there was a way to enlighten the people to the struggle of her friends. Maybe if they shopped more they’d be more relatable, but you need money to shop and you need jobs for money and it was hard to get a job when people didn’t know what gender you were, hence the need for an illuminating television show. Michelle sighed. Maybe she would find meaningful work in Los Angeles after all.

So, there’s some blood on the passenger seat, the cop announced as the police cruiser rolled out of the Mission. Michelle had had her face pressed to the glass of the cop car, dying to see someone she knew. How hilarious would that be! Think of the rumors! But it was so early, like eight o’clock in the morning. Michelle didn’t know anyone who got up that early. Maybe she’d see someone stumbling back from one of Captain’s after-parties or something.

Blood! Michelle gasped. Had the van been used in a crime?

Not a lot, the cop said. Maybe none at all. But there’s something on that seat. We’ll have to open it up. Michelle and Quinn stared at one another in excited horror. What if there was like a dead body in the van? Both watched a lot of Unsolved Mysteries and had bonded over a mutual obsession with Robert Stack, his suits and his hair and his grim delivery. They liked when he delivered his mournful epilogues before a blue screen no one had bothered to project an image onto. It was so low-rent — the sordid vanishings, the bad reenactments, the alarming sound track.

If There Is A Dead Body In The Van I Could End Up On Unsolved Mysteries , Michelle whispered, but the cop heard her. He played down the likelihood of murder.

It’s not like a blood bath in there, he said, glancing at them in the rearview mirror a little too long. Michelle grew nervous. If there was a murder the lovers would be immediate suspects. Warrants to search Michelle’s home would be issued swiftly. Drugs would be discovered and nobody likes a druggie. People kill for drugs, everyone knows that. Drugs are a gateway crime for murder. Quinn was already passively lying to the cop, allowing him to think she was a man even though no one had said anything. It didn’t matter. None of it would look good on paper. Michelle forsook her Unsolved Mysteries aspirations and hoped there were no dead bodies in the van.

The van — a Dodge, fat and blue — had been brought to the curb at a hectic angle and abandoned. No windows were smashed. The vehicle was laughably easy to break into, you jiggled the handle and the locks practically popped themselves open for you. The pair looked for the blood the cop had mentioned. They found it on the cracked front seat, a few dark red sprinkles on the pleather. A bizarrely familiar sticky nub of heroin clung there as well. A plastic bag of syringes on the floor. The van had been stolen by junkies! A Big Gulp from the 7-Eleven sat on the dash, the ice melted, condensation sweating through the waxy cup. Everywhere were cookie crumbs, as if the joyriding dopeheads had grabbed great fistfuls of animal crackers and crushed them in their palms, flinging the sweet debris around the vehicle like confetti. Someone had had a great time in that van. Michelle walked around the side of it and slid open the door for the cop. It was empty.

All right, the cop said, I got a tow truck coming, you can pick it up at 850 Bryant.

What? Michelle asked. Can’t I Just Take It?

It got a ticket for being parked in a bus zone , the cop explained , and on top of that you have a bunch of outstanding parking tickets. You like to park on the sidewalk, it looks like?

Fucking Ziggy! Drunk driving home from the bar and leaving the van on the sidewalk in front of her house. The arrogance! Those Weren’t My Tickets, Michelle began.

This vehicle has too many tickets. You pay them at 850 Bryant and we’ll release the van to you. And, here. The cop grabbed the bag of needles and flung them at Michelle. Take care of these please.

The cop’s work was done. He gave them a nod of dismissal. Michelle was aghast. She’d been pulled out of her narcotic slumber for this? To be abandoned on top of some godforsaken hilly part of San Francisco she had never been to? Where was the Mission? Aren’t You Going To Drive Us Back?