Michelle Tea - Black Wave

I Don’t Think So, Michelle said. I’m Already Here. Paid My First And Last And My Security. The Building Is Fine, People Are Nice, The World Is Going To End In Like A Year Anyway. I Won’t Make Anything Bad Happen To Me Before Then, Michelle promised.

The world’s gonna end, Wendy chuckled. You sound like Kym. That’s all she talks about, she’s paranoid.

Really? Michelle perked up.

Yes. I told her I can’t listen to it anymore, she sounds like a crazy person.

Can I Talk To Her? Michelle asked.

She’s sleeping, Wendy said. Her illness. You find a job yet?

No.

How come you can’t find one, aren’t there any jobs in Los Angeles? Can’t Kyle get you a job?

No, Ma, Michelle said. People Can’t Just Give People Jobs.

Well, why can’t you find one? You went to UMass Boston for that year, that should make a difference.

College Only Helps If You Finish, Ma. Otherwise it Doesn’t Count.

It still cost you like five thousand dollars, that should count for something.

Well, It Doesn’t.

The conversation had entered the danger zone. Wendy’s insistence to be helpful coupled with her total inability to help plus Michelle’s reluctance to ask her mother to back off times her determination to endure the conversation equaled the probability of Michelle being cast into a dark mood.

I Basically Have A High School Education, Michelle said with gritted teeth. High School Means Nothing, Nobody Cares About High School, Everyone Goes, It’s Meaningless.

You know, your grandfather never went to high school, Wendy said. He dropped out and went right into the Navy.

I Know, Ma, Michelle said. She lit a new cigarette from the crushed tip of the old. I Can’t Talk About It Anymore.

Oh, I’m stressing you out. I can hear it in your voice. I don’t want to stress you out. You know about the stress hormone? When you’re stressed out your body makes this hormone and it makes you fat. Watch out.

Okay I Will.

And watch it with the smoking.

Okay, Ma. I Will.

A pause. You okay?

Yeah, Ma, Of Course. I’m Fine.

Michelle took the bus out to the beach, just to see if the ocean was as bad as in San Francisco. It was both worse and better. The water was clotted, a vast dumpster, but an eerie fog came off it like something out of a Stephen King story. Michelle was sure a chemical reaction was occurring, like when you dump bleach into ammonia and create a murderous steam. Whatever was deadly in the waters had merged with the low-slung Los Angeles smog and a new fatal compound was born. Michelle was afraid to linger by the wreck of it too long, even though artists had built the shore into a trashed fun house. Whimsical sculptures rose from the mucked sand. Michelle fell in love with a mermaid fashioned from oil drums and rust, her hair a wreath of burned plastic. The mystery mist crawled from the waves to the shore and slipped around the statuary like ghosts.

Michelle had actually not gone to the beach alone, but with Lu. They had driven there together. They had had a car, a terrible source of stress. Something from the seventies, a Continental, bigger than half a city bus. They fought about the car a lot, but Michelle didn’t want to think about fights right now. She wanted to think about how they had played in the sand. It was a sweet time, when they had first arrived. Before they had to get jobs, and so jobs weren’t a problem and Lu’s gender wasn’t a problem and money wasn’t a problem. They had made the mermaid on the beach. They had done it together, sand on their hands.

Michelle felt sad at all the sweet moments she would not be able to write about. The sweet parts were important, without them Michelle just looked insane. Lu was storm clouds and eggshells but she was also goofy sweetness and tender love. Funny dances with a dog-faced underbite and low, dangling arms. Fingers that were kissing bird beaks. Their own language: Bummerino, Vinnie Barbarino! was one stage of disappointment, Bummerino, Grand Torino! another. Life with another person was built on such things.

Back in the story, Michelle walked to the bus stop and began the arduous return trip to Hollywood. The ride took Sunset all the way, past the street that turned off into the gay center. She looked over at it with mixed emotions, wondering if she should check it out. She missed her friends back in San Francisco, who had completely forgotten about her. She’d seen people leave town, she knew how it went. No one ever spoke about them again. Life moved too fast. There was too much in front of your face to concern yourself with what wasn’t there anymore.

Michelle wondered how she would find new friends, she wasn’t the kind of gay who hung out at a gay center. Michelle supposed she was a postgay. It was an offensive term, how could anyone be postgay when queers were still getting beaten and strung to fences and shot at and raped? But it would be a lie for Michelle to pretend her environment had been hostile. She’d lived in West Coast cities, she was gender normative. She was kind of postgay. And as a postgay in Los Angeles, she figured she would not really have any friends. Fabian was busy like LA people were busy, each day a succession of meetings. Michelle didn’t quite understand what Fabian did, it had something to do with the Spanish film industry, like in Spain, but also with Brad Pitt. Kyle was in the clutches of his psychotic boss, working twelve-hour days and then managing the woman’s social calendar, keeping up with her Match.com profile and fast-tracking her adoption of a third world baby. Michelle got a membership at a Hollywood Video within walking distance from her apartment and rented so many movies the simpleton behind the counter whistled through her teeth at her. You watch a lot of movies, she said, shaking her head.

So? Michelle snapped defensively, then wondered if she should ask if they were hiring. The dull cashier seemed vaguely dykey. But Michelle was too proud.

Back at the computer, Michelle strove to universalize herself. But the more she thought about it, the less universal she became. She had tried to write herself straight, but she was so low-rent. She tried to write herself male, but then there was her pussy and her PMS, the blood that dribbled out from her on its own erratic schedule, ruining her underwear again and again, never mind that she had been menstruating off and on for fifteen years, it didn’t matter, she could not keep up with her tampons. Until the cotton overflowed it did not occur to her to change it. The stain of her femaleness bled through her attempts to write herself male. She struggled.

Page after page she built a straight, male, middle-class Michelle who did not drink and did not do drugs. Oh, wait — could she do that now? As a straight, male, middle-class man could she now shoot literary heroin and go on a literary crack bender? It depended, she suspected, on where straight, male, middle-class Michelle worked and how many dependents depended on him. Michelle realized that this was what they called raising the stakes. Sometimes the fact that she had not gone to college really did seem to have a negative effect on her life. If Michelle had gone to college she was certain she’d have been taught how to write from the perspective of a straight, white, middle-class man. She would have to teach herself how to be universal. She could do it, it would just take time. Meanwhile, she found a job around the corner, at the used book and record store.

Michelle lived in a neighborhood, a rarity in Hollywood. It had a name: the Franklin Strip. It was a strip of Franklin Avenue, just one block long, but that was enough. The block was packed with merchants. A coffee shop called — no, really — the Bourgeois Pig. Michelle was aghast. She knew that Los Angeles embraced wealth in a manner she was unaccustomed to but this was unreal. The Bourgeois Pig? Their coffees were four dollars and Michelle once spied Christina Ricci sitting at an outdoor table. Next to the Bourgeois Pig was a magazine store that sold a severely edited selection of about five different magazines. It was a very minimalist shop, and the girl working the counter looked bored and superior as she flipped through a copy of Index . Michelle envied her employment, she was right to vibe superior. Michelle could think of nothing better than being paid to flip through magazines all day. She thought about asking if the magazine store was hiring but knew instinctively that it was the kind of place where you were invited to work, like a beautiful young girl discovered by a modeling agency at a soda fountain.