Michelle Tea - Black Wave

Sometimes It Feels Like A Mental Illness, Michelle said to Quinn. They were seated on the kitchen floor, relaxing against the cabinets. Their knees bumped together in a friendly fashion. Being A Writer. Being This Kind Of Writer. It Feels Compulsive. I Get Sweaty. I Wish I Was A Painter. I Wish The Story Came Out In An Image Of Like A Rotting Eggplant. A Dark, Swirly Rotting Eggplant With Really Thick Ridges Of Oil Paint That Take Months To Dry. And I Could Point At It And Say — That Is Lucretia. That Was Our Relationship. I Could Paint A Cigarette-Smoking Corgi In A Visor And Name The Painting Mother . That Would Be Awesome. But It’s Not What I Do. I Write Five-Hundred-Page Books About My Life And Then Have To Remove The Main Story Line So People Don’t Think Someone Was A Jerk For Being A Jerk.

Well, I bet you were a jerk too, Quinn said. I mean, so far in this story you’ve been pretty unsympathetic.

Thanks, Michelle said. I’ve Really Tried. I Just Wanted To Write About What Happens To Your Heart And Your Mind When You’re In An Oppressive Relationship. I Wanted To Try To Understand How People Stay In Shitty Situations, The Weird Head Fuck Of Love And Anxiety. It’s Like Being Electrocuted, It Makes You Cling To The Very Thing Hurting You.

Ooh, that’s a good metaphor, Quinn said. Why don’t you just write a poem about it? No one ever really understands what a poem is about. You could hide all kinds of complaints in there.

It Just Isn’t Coming Out That Way.

Quinn understood. Well, what are you going to do?

I Have To Get Back Into My Story, Michelle said sadly. It was hard being such a mess. She knew what had happened to her in Los Angeles and she was not looking forward to reliving it. I Can’t Wait For This Book To Be Over So I Can Be Sober Again.

What’s the book even about? Quinn asked. If you’ve removed the main story.

Michelle wasn’t sure. Couldn’t a book just be about life? Me, My Alcoholism, I Think. The Nineties. Being Poor. The Feeling Of It All.

The nineties, Quinn said in a dreamy voice, and shook her head with longing. Like everyone, Quinn was younger than Michelle and had rosy feelings about 1990s San Francisco. A place that Quinn would never get to go, and Michelle had lived there. Quinn wasn’t alone — lots of younger queers held the decade in this reverent light. It was funny to Michelle. The nineties had been so ugly in so many ways. No one’s clothes fit them right. Everyone wearing men’s leather jackets, all boxy and awkward. Dog collars as necklaces. So much sexual acting out, like the whole community had been sexually abused and had agreed to purge the trauma by having lots of violent public sex. In fact, just last night, not in this book but in real life, someone had asked Michelle, Remember that Thanksgiving when I went to your house and wound up getting pierced by Cooper in your bathroom?

Michelle remembered. She’d had to go into the bathroom to retrieve her coat, which for some reason was in the bathtub. She remembered the precision of the pins and the beads of blood shimmering on the girl’s solar plexus, the latex-gloved hands of her friend holding the needle. The nineties. Like a folie à deux shared by an entire community. A sort of sexual mass hysteria.

I Think I Should Make You Go, Michelle told Quinn.

Okay, Quinn said. When do we get to hang out again?

Not In This Book, Michelle shook her head sadly. The World Is Going To End In About A Year, Before We Ever Meet Each Other.

Oh. Quinn nodded. It’s like a metaphor for the end of love.

Breakups Alter Your Brain Chemistry, Michelle said. Everything Is Doomed And Ruined And Horrible. You Used To Be This Beautiful Trusting Thing And You Just Get Used By Thoughtless, Shitty People And Then You’re Irreparably Damaged.

Quinn sighed. Bummer .

Also I Couldn’t Figure Out How To End The Book, Michelle explained. With Memoirs The Story Just Keeps Going. You’re Supposed To Wrap It Up All Nicely But It’s Real Life. It’s Hard. So I Think I’m Just Going To Have The World Explode.

Quinn nodded. Okay, so — what should I do? To leave?

You Don’t Have To Do Anything, Michelle said. I’ll Do It.

She hit save and closed her computer.

Where did your own story end and other people’s begin? Michelle wrestled with this question. After her first book came out she’d been invited to give some lectures and teach some workshops, and always the people who came were females, females who wanted to tell their stories. Their stories being female stories, there was a lot of hurt inside them — abuse, betrayals, injustices, feelings. They were all worried about getting in trouble for writing the truth. They didn’t want people to be mad at them. It’s Your Story, Michelle would insist.

She wanted to free them all, all the girl writers. Girls needed to tell the truth about what the fuck was going on in this world. It was bad. It was brave of the girls to let themselves stay so raw, though Michelle worried that some of them had had to conjure personality disorders in order to cope. Sometimes the girls were too much even for her, Michelle wondered if she could handle another piece of writing about sexual abuse or sex work. But it seemed that this was to be her job upon the earth. If you don’t tell your story, who will? It was important. Our stories are important.

Then Michelle started hanging out at the Zen Center too much. What was a story if you didn’t even exist? Michelle observed the way she told the same stories about herself, thereby cementing this false idea of self harder and harder in her psyche. It was all ego. There was no Michelle, so how could there be her memoir? It seemed to Michelle, sitting on a straw floor in a wide room, her legs folded atop each other, eyes half-mast, that being a writer of memoir was one of the most violent and anti-Buddhist things a person could do with their life. She thought of her fight with Lu. It was her story fighting with Lu’s story. If neither of them even existed, why bother fighting? No self, no story. Michelle felt the ache and burn of her ego hurling itself against such thoughts as she sat down at her computer in Los Angeles.

Michelle would begin the story with her nonexistent self smoking crack in a van in San Francisco. Alone, so as not to stomp on anyone’s right to privacy: Her friends’ right to smoke crack with a recent ex-con, the ex-con’s right to procure crack cocaine for a bunch of dykes and then play with their tits. Everyone’s inalienable rights would be upheld within the text of her book. She would write only about herself, and she would make it Buddhist and universal.

The more Michelle stared at the glow of the screen the more she noticed it had its own pulse, seemed strangely alive. She recalled that people who’d done certain psychedelic drugs claimed that in their heightened state they’d understood that electricity was alive. Michelle thought about it, this invisible force that strung her world together. What was electricity? Maybe it was God, the universe she prayed to. She prayed to God, the universe, electricity, and her computer to please help her write another book. She had written one already, why was it still so hard? In most occupations the tasks become easier with practice, the worker grows confident. Michelle thought of her mother Wendy, able to insert a catheter, administer a shot, execute her nursely duties with a swiftness and élan her patients were grateful for. I had to push a woman’s rectum in, she told Michelle on a recent phone call.

What Are You Talking About? Michelle asked, terrified to learn. Each woman was in her respective kitchen, smoking her respective cigarettes. Michelle’s kitchen was awash with carcinogenic sunlight, making the kitschy yellow table she’d thrifted in North Hollywood look especially cheerful. Michelle thought the table had magical properties, was a shade of yellow that corresponded to positive neural pathways in her brain. Daily she awoke in the dingy gray of her bedroom and pulled herself to the kitchen to stare down at the table like meditating. After a minute of flooding her eyes with that hue she was able to smoke, make coffee, kill the cockroaches scurrying along her countertops.