Michelle Tea - Black Wave

In reality, Quinn and Michelle weren’t scheduled to meet one another for over a decade, when a series of flirtatious Gchats led to a brief affair involving diners, karaoke bars, and blanket forts. It was sweet for about five minutes, but then Michelle found herself in possession of a bottle of Vicodin from a bout of oral surgery. Believe it or not, Michelle hadn’t ingested drugs or alcohol in eight years. But, being a drug addict, Michelle swiftly began abusing the Vicodin. By the second day on painkillers she had stopped eating in order to increase the chemical’s effect.

Michelle wound up sickened with a panic attack outside an In-N-Out Burger in Hercules, California, sending Quinn inside to get her a cheeseburger, animal style, with fries. When Quinn returned, Michelle was sobbing, terrified she would have to change her sobriety date, awestruck by how quickly she’d become insane. Sober for nearly a decade, all it took was one day on pain pills for Michelle to become obsessed and scheming, starving herself to plump her high.

Quinn didn’t believe in the rhetoric of addiction and thus consoled Michelle, You’re just a girl who forgot to eat. You’re upsetting yourself by seeing it all through this lens of addiction and AA.

Michelle thought that only people who went to AA understood the true nature of addiction. She didn’t hold Quinn’s ignorance against her, but she wondered how safe it was for her to date a person who didn’t believe in alcoholism. Michelle was nothing if not an alcoholic. More than being queer or a writer, Polish, or even female, it was what had shaped her life.

Quinn couldn’t believe that this might be a deal breaker. Let me get this straight, Quinn said. They were heaped moodily in a large curving booth in an Italian restaurant in North Beach. The Mafia Booth, the bartender who had seated them called it. You would break up with me because I don’t agree with your definition of alcoholism. They ate pizza and salad. Michelle still felt off from her pill binge. She’d forgotten how immediate and epic her hangovers were. People talked about this in AA — how your alcoholism continues to worsen even as you abstain, and if you do use again the effect is far worse than it was the last time.

My disease is in the basement, doing push-ups , Michelle had heard addicts say. And it was true. Two days taking Vicodin as directed, only altering her diet for maximum high, and she was still fragile and teary a week later. She shared her insight with Quinn.

Alcoholism is not a disease, Quinn argued.

It’s Been Proven, Michelle said. By Science. A Million Times Over.

Really? Quinn asked skeptically. Really? Because I don’t think that is true. I don’t think science has all the answers. Quinn was also against therapy and the entire concept of healing . It was ridiculous for Michelle — whose days were divided between AA meetings, Al-Anon meetings, meditation at the Zen Center, the elliptical machine at 24-Hour Fitness, and sessions with a therapist — to date this person.

Wait, I’m really confused. Quinn felt a rising panic as she sat there on the carpet of Michelle’s studio apartment. What do you mean we haven’t met? An existential chill ran through the girl. It felt true. Something about this whole connection had felt otherworldly, like Quinn was experiencing everything through a shallow pool of water. Life wavered. She’d thought it was the drugs.

This Is A Story, Michelle gestured at the studio apartment. It was a bleak place enlivened by the brutal constancy of the Southern California sunshine. Michelle had decided against wearing a visor or carrying a sun umbrella. No matter how deadly its rays, the sun always cheered Michelle. It made the spotty white walls of her new studio less depressing. The hard plank of carpet. The sag of the futon on the floor. The strange parade of end-time insects doing their last waltz underneath the kitchen sink.

This, Michelle told Quinn, Is My Memoir.

Memoirs are true, Quinn, also a writer, pointed out.

This One Is Part True And Part False. All That Stuff I Just Said, About When We Dated, Is True.

God , Quinn said. It doesn’t make me look very good. Did I tell you you could write about me?

No, Michelle said, But You Didn’t Tell Me I Couldn’t. The Person I Really Came To Los Angeles With Is Lucretia. I Actually Wrote The Whole Book With Her In It. Our Whole Story. Eight Years, Five Hundred Pages.

Quinn whistled through her teeth. Eight years! The slam poet from the first part of the book? You were with her for eight years?

I Know, Michelle said. It Was Really Complicated. She Didn’t Want Me To Write About Her But Our Breakup Was So Shitty And Awful I Just Really Needed To Tell The Story. You Know How A Story Needs To Get Told?

Quinn did. It was one of the reasons Michelle brought her into the book. Quinn was a poet and knew the feeling of writing bubbling up inside her, like a pot coming to boil. You lunge for a pen before it goes away. You have to capture it. If you let it come, it just pours out. Five hundred pages.

At a bookstore in New York City in the year 2011, more than a decade after the world ends in Black Wave , Michelle stood before a microphone and read from that five-hundred-page memoir novel. She read about being there in that very apartment. How it had smelled strongly of the dish soap they used, yellow, purchased at the dollar store. Michelle and Lu had both been delighted to find that all items in the dollar store really were only a dollar. Dollar dinner plates painted with tulips. Dollar juice glasses with elephants and bumble bees. They brought these items back to this little kitchen in Los Angeles and placed them inside the built-in cabinets, at least in the ones that weren’t painted shut with gobs of white paint.

In the story she read, Michelle tries to make Lu a bowl of beans. She adds corn and grates cheese into it, she seasons it with cumin and chili powder. All the while Lu is terribly mean to her. Lu has very low blood sugar. She can’t find a job because she looks like both a boy and a girl and this makes people uncomfortable, so they tell her they are not hiring even though there are NOW HIRING signs hung all over the place. This makes Lu feel insane. She fights with Michelle, who is only trying to help, until Michelle collapses on the linoleum floor.

Like This, Michelle shows Quinn. They’re in the kitchen in Los Angeles. Michelle beats her fists against the floor, then lets her forehead come to rest upon it. Her shoulders shake and heave as if she is sobbing. She raises her head.

Imagine There Are Little Bits Of Saucy Beans Splattered Around Me, Michelle guides her. Because I Just Threw The Wooden Spoon.

Eventually, Lu takes over and cooks the beans and they eat together. Michelle sobs through dinner. She is not yet on psychiatric medication and so once she starts to cry she cannot stop until she retires for the night. She is also not yet sober, so she spends almost every night getting drunk in the kitchen, alone, while Lu tries to sleep, the kitchen light shining on her head. Michelle fills the kitchen with cigarette smoke. Lu is nineteen and Michelle is twenty-eight.

After the New York reading, Michelle and Lu had a tremendous fight in front of the beverage table at a party. At the end of the fight, Michelle agreed to remove Lu from the book. It just wasn’t worth it. It kept Lu close to her, she realized, when they had been separate for so long, four years. If the book was ever published she’d have to talk about Lu all the time, what a horror. And it was bad for their respective romantic lives, keeping them linked in this way. At the end of the fight they felt closer, like comrades, and Michelle realized with a sick feeling that this was the same mechanism that had kept them together as lovers all those years. She returned from her trip and deleted Lucretia from the manuscript.