Michelle Tea - Black Wave

I’m not a taxi, the cop said. He went back to his squad car to wait for the tow truck.

What Am I Supposed To Do With These? Michelle shook the bag at Quinn. Never mind what she would do now that the van had been impounded. She couldn’t afford to bail it out, no way. It would rot there. How would Michelle get off this sinking ship of a city? Michelle had to get out of there. The energetic walls of San Francisco were closing in on her. Of course the van had been stolen, her plan ruined, by druggies. How desperate do you have to be to actually inject something into your bloodstream? You did not have control of your life if you were unable to wait two minutes for the drugs to work through your sinuses.

I Cannot Bring These Home, Michelle said intensely, rattling the bag.

Of course not, Quinn shrugged.

No Really, Michelle said.

Throw them away , Quinn nodded at a trash can on the curb.

Someone Could Get Stuck. A Sanitation Worker.

So? They’re clean.

Yeah, But Imagine How Scared They’d Be. They Wouldn’t Know They’re Clean. They’d Have To Get Tested And Everything.

There are actual dirty needles in the trash in San Francisco, Quinn said. There’s like toxic waste. I’m sure they wear gloves and stuff.

Michelle’s mother Wendy had once been stuck with a questionable needle at the psych hospital. She was dosed with precautionary AIDS meds that made her terribly sick. For a week she writhed in bed, sweating from fever dreams of sawing her own lip off or having bullets lodged in her brain. She was certain she had AIDS, punished by God, but for what? Being gay? Did Wendy really believe that? She supposed, in some dark corner of her brain, she did. And the AIDS medication had turned her brain into one big dark corner.

Michelle and Kyle learned of their mother’s hardship like they always did, long after the fact, when the opportunity to help had come and gone.

Why Didn’t You Tell Us? Michelle wailed, though what could she have done? Her mothers were so far away, and plane rides were pricey.

If Michelle thought about putting the needles in the trash can on the sidewalk she thought of her mother’s hand, laden with Claddagh rings and shaded with nicotine, reaching in and getting pricked.

I’ll Take Them To The Hospital, she said.

Walking through the lobby, searching for a biohazard bin, Michelle couldn’t stop thinking of her moms. She hadn’t told them she was moving. Michelle’s life made her moms nervous and Michelle hated the feeling of it — sort of monstrous, always bad all the time. They were happy she was gay, of course, but she was a weird sort of gay, a degenerate gay. She didn’t want to sue the government for the right to marry, she wasn’t interested in gays in the military, she was queerly promiscuous and thought that this was enough, that this was activism. Wendy and Kym hated to say it but it was Michelle and her generation that were holding back the gay rights movement. When Fox News wanted to show gay people, did they bring a camera crew to Wendy and Kym’s to show two middle-aged, out-of-shape lesbians smoking cigarettes in front of the television like the rest of their audience? No. They went to people like Michelle and her friends, who seemed to only want to scar their bodies and strap rubber phalluses to their crotch.

Wendy and Kym checked in on Michelle and Kyle, and Michelle and Kyle checked in on their moms, and then the siblings checked in with each other about their moms — epic conversations wherein Michelle and Kyle detailed all the ways in which their mothers’ lives were sad and stunted, all the ways they could be better if they would just do something to improve their circumstances. They clucked and marveled at Wendy’s unwillingness to become a different person, not this chain-smoking, codependent caretaker of crazy people by day and Kym by night. Working too much overtime, getting bleary with sleep deprivation and then jabbing herself with a needle. Michelle and Kyle talked about the needle incident forever. Was it a cry for help? How ironic it would be for their mother of all people to get AIDS.

And what about Kym? Was she really sick? Had Michelle seen the movie Safe ? Kyle wanted to know. Was their other mother really physically ill or was she profoundly depressed, mentally ill, or, even worse, was she simply a lazy bitch? The options were all so terrible to consider. They found themselves oddly hoping that their mom was in fact struck down by a diabolical, new environmental illness.

Everyone hung up their phones upset and grim. Everyone’s hearts were clogged with love for one other — inexpressible, jammed-up love, love that leached like a toxin into the bloodstream, one it would take a surgery to release. This was a family.

Sometimes Michelle tripped out on her deep and painful love for her mothers. If they weren’t related, Wendy would just be one of those trashy lesbians she couldn’t relate to. Kym would be one of those people you see on the bus, sick and stoned. It seemed everything had gone wrong for these people — if there was a social injustice it had happened to them, if there was a malaise they suffered from it, if there was bad luck they’d been stroked by it. Michelle felt repelled by these people, as if their condition, the whole of it, was contagious. She felt bad about this but it was true. And her own mother was one of them. Sickly and paranoid, a drain on those around her. Michelle loved her with a love that had nowhere to go, a bird flying into a window.

Michelle couldn’t save her mothers and that was all her love was meant to do. And so the love was useless and exhausting. It turned to rage inside Michelle and so she also hated them. Why was she supposed to help them? Michelle could barely help herself. She lived below the poverty level in a city rapidly filling with rich people. At least Wendy had a career. She could go back to school and better her earning power, she could stop smoking. Kym had gone to community college, she could stop smoking pot, go to therapy, get on an antidepressant, leave the house, make some friends, maybe teach a fucking class or something. Why did Michelle feel like she had to do such things for these women, register Wendy for classes or find a homeopath for Kym?

Michelle felt responsible for her moms’ happiness. She felt she owed them something, something big. The families that had disowned them were full of older women whose go-getter daughters had married up or gotten into antiques and took their mothers gambling in Atlantic City or on Caribbean cruises. Was that what Michelle was supposed to do? Was that what her moms were waiting for? Another perk that their lesbianism had robbed them of.

And so it was in this dark space that Michelle entered the hospital on the hill, a bag of needles in her hand, thinking that by saving a hypothetical sanitation worker she was somehow helping her moms. Deep in the throes of her emotional bender, Michelle was oblivious to her appearance. She looked like a wild drug addict, face bloated and splotchy, hair a blue tangle, malnourished in her skinny jeans, braless in her thin shirt, the twin pyramids of her tits poking around, her nipples staring out from the worn rattlesnake fabric. The secretary showed alarm at the bag of needles in her hand. Can I help you?

My Van Was Stolen And Whoever Did It Left These— rattle, rattle —In The Back Seat. They’re Clean But Maybe You Have A Biohazard Container I Can Leave These In?

The woman’s face twitched. You can’t bring those in here.

You Don’t Have A Biohazard Container? I Don’t Think They’re Dirty But—

You can’t just bring a bunch of needles into a hospital trying to dump them. There are laws, we can’t even —