Michelle Tea: Black Wave

Michelle stretched out on the van floor, leaning against the bench seat in the back, teetering between boredom and discomfort. As a writer, Michelle was happy to have smoked the crack. Having been unable to get it together and apply to college, she knew her literary education would happen on the streets. The streets were like the ocean — full of trash and beauty, and no one had the right to say which was which, not at this late date. Michelle would sit on the curb and illuminate what the tide pulled in.

Ziggy was an expert drunk driver. She took corners fast and loose, coming up on two wheels and returning to four with the grace of a pilot touching down on the tarmac. Soon Ziggy would tire of this escapade and drive her and Stitch home. Until that happened, Michelle knew her friends would make sure their new acquaintance didn’t slide his hand up the underwear she was trying to pass off as a dress. She could relax and space out, attempt to locate the effects of the drug in her body, elusive beneath the familiar roll of liquor. She yawned and checked “smoke crack” off her to-do list. The van rumbled to her door as the rumor of morning began to glimmer in the sky. Michelle felt relief. Nights she fell asleep before the sun came up were good nights. It meant that her life was under control.

That afternoon Michelle woke up on her futon craving a salt bagel and an Odwalla, the inside of her mouth an apocalypse, same as always. The sun blasted her windows, the dirt on the glass more a curtain than the shreds of gauzy fabric she’d hung over the panes. A carousel of flies buzzed in drunken circles in the air above her bed. It was past noon. Stitch had left for work hours ago to teach children at a Montessori school. Ziggy, she figured, would sleep until sunset, wake up in a shame spiral, and clean her room the way men at car washes detail their sports cars — anxiously, thoroughly, washing the narrow ledges of baseboard with a vinegar-soaked rag. Color-coding her sock drawer. Superstitious cleaning, its intent to ward off demons obvious. Once Ziggy’s room was clean she would roast an organic chicken or something. She would make plans to hang out with her other friends — people she knew from Minneapolis, people their age who seemed bizarrely older because they owned a house or were trying to get pregnant or managed a Starbucks in the Financial District. They were nice people but Michelle couldn’t relate to them. Whenever they got together, usually for something in Ziggy’s honor, Michelle felt prickly, like she was in junior high again, eating dinner at a classmate’s house, getting judged by her classmate’s parents. She felt buttons become latched around her personality, she reigned herself in. Her eyes swooped down regularly to make sure her boobs weren’t falling out of whatever lingerie she was pretending was a shirt. Michelle’s boobs were so small they should not have been able to fall out of anything, which said much about the state of her wardrobe. Michelle would be stiff and quiet through the gathering until she began to drink, and then she would get in a fight with the woman who managed the Starbucks.

Ziggy would spend the rest of the month with these adult friends. The memory of the crack and the convict, the brutality of the hangover would all fade, and Ziggy would call Michelle, and Michelle would soon find herself in a bathroom with Ziggy, the din beyond the locked door a low roar, and they would do some drugs together and burst out into the mayhem. They would begin anew.

Stitch, too, would briefly change her ways. She would monitor her immune system nervously, feeling up her throat for lumps. She would gargle with salt water and pop supplements. She would eat niacin and flush red as it burned the toxins out from her skin. The foods she prepared would be selected for the medicinal qualities they possessed. She would eat bowls of anemic leafy greens and raw garlic smeared on toast. The pint glasses stolen from the bar would get crammed with halved lemons and cayenne pepper. Stitch would think she was getting sick for about a week and then she would be ready to drink Budweiser, to score something powdered for her nose, to convince Michelle to let her cut a design into the skin of her arm with an X-Acto knife because they were very drunk and slightly bored and grooving on being best friends. Stitch loved carving on people when she was drunk. Michelle had a little star, an asterisk keloided on her upper shoulder from such a night. One of Stitch’s ex-girlfriends, Little Becky, had what looked like the words ZOO KEG etched into her stomach, right where her sports bra ended. It actually read 2:00 KEG and was meant to be instructions for Little Becky to either return a tapped keg to the liquor store by 2:00 or a reminder for Little Becky to come to a keg party at 2:00. No one could remember. Michelle had liked Little Becky. She had an odd manner, bashfully respectful, her hands clasped behind her back, her eyes cast low. Her shaggy-dog hairdo tumbled onto her face. She was gentle. She cried very easily. But something about Stitch and Becky’s relationship turned Becky into a monster. She flung Stitch’s leather dildo harness out the air shaft, where it landed in an ancient pile of garbage, irretrievable. She stabbed a steak knife into Stitch’s bedroom walls then burst into tears. Michelle was glad when they broke up. Her room was right beside Stitch’s, she never could be sure if the rough sounds coming from her neighbor were sex or something more troubled.

Michelle got out of her crummy futon and fished around on the wooden floor of her bedroom for something to wear to the bagel shop. Every day she ordered a salt bagel with dill cucumber cream cheese, prompting one bagel worker, also a student at the Chinese medicine school, to wonder what caused her to wake each day with such a thirst for salt. Michelle just shrugged and waited for the girl to pour her giant cup of coffee and drop her bagel on the toaster’s glowing conveyor belt.

Michelle lived three blocks from the bagel shop. Every morning she thought of the walk with dread, it brought her through the crossroads of Sixteenth and Mission. Crackheads, skinny and grimy and as indistinguishable as pigeons, trolled the corner, fighting with one another, spare changing or nodding off, baking where the bricks sloped up around the BART hole. That afternoon Michelle paid them special mind. At one time they were like her, they had had this day: the day after they first smoked crack. Surely none of them thought it would land them there, drooling in public, their mouths askew, shit on their pants, looking like zombies, their eyes bugged and their minds emptied. No one did drugs thinking they’d become a drug addict. Everyone was looking for fun and sure of their control, just like Michelle right then, moving past that curbside death row, heading toward Valencia where the crackheads fell away and were replaced by boutiques and bagelries. Michelle touched her cheeks, already hot from the terrible sun. She needed to buy sunscreen or one of those special global-warming visors that came down over your face and made you look like an asshole. The thought of buying anything beyond a bagel exhausted her.

What would Michelle do while her friends recovered from their drug binge? She would sit at the bagelry and try to write another book. The heartbreak of having written and published a first book is that the world then expected you to write a second. She would sit in cafés and scribble in her notebook and feel superior to the cleaner people with laptops flipped open on their nearby tables. She would write, and later she would read her efforts aloud in the remaining neighborhood bars. She would report to her job at the bookstore this week in slightly better condition for not having spent her evenings in bar bathrooms with Ziggy and Stitch. When her friends were repaired they would call for her, and she would come.