Michelle Tea - Black Wave

There was a small theater run by second-rate soap-opera actors trying to do something serious while clambering out from the daytime TV ghetto. There was a bar and grill where the soap-opera actors would get tanked and pick each other up. Michelle once saw the actor who played Lex Luthor on Smallville , looking handsome and gay with his shiny bald head. Michelle thought all men looked gay, it was an effect of having lived in San Francisco so long, where all the men actually were.

Fancy boutiques sold feathered mules and bejeweled purses, guides to foreign lands and candles that smelled like leather. These were lifestyle boutiques, their inventory was random but had a certain logic. If you didn’t understand, it wasn’t your lifestyle. There was a French restaurant with DJs and fistfights on the weekends, well-dressed men tumbling through the glass doors in a violent clutch.

Then there was the used book and record store, an eyesore on the block. Michelle peered in the window. The interior was nothing but dust and wood and books, books everywhere, more than the shelves could hold, books in tumbled piles, books invading the space reserved for records, heaped atop stacks of rare opera albums, books blocking the aisles and sliding off wooden carts. The shelves were hand-built with unfinished wood, the apparent creation of hippie gnomes. Inside Michelle could hear hip-hop playing, recognized the obscene lyrics of a Lil’ Kim song. A tall, skinny, gay boy, his head wrapped in a red bandana, leaned idly at the register, mouthing the lyrics into the air.

Michelle had a deep feeling of magnetic purpose while peering into the bookstore as if into an aquarium, or perhaps a crystal ball. She turned away from the shop and faced the Scientology Celebrity Centre across the street. It was a Disneyesque compound, all peaks and turrets, lit with soft, glowing lights. The sun had set, the HOLLYWOOD sign was dark, someone had turned out the lights so the city’s desperate weren’t called to hurl themselves from the letters in the suicidal night. In the daytime the Scientologists blared classical music from their landscaped gardens, loud enough to envelope the Franklin Strip and make it feel like a sort of Main Street USA to the Scientologists’ Cinderella Castle.

Michelle turned back to the bookstore. She had a resume stuffed in her army bag and a psychic understanding that if she walked into the bookstore and handed that boy the piece of paper she would be hired immediately. She regarded this uncanny knowledge with dread. Maybe she didn’t want a job. The dread was ridiculous, a toddler’s tantrum — Michelle could not not have a job. She’d been working since she was fourteen, had had to get a special card from City Hall to be signed by her mothers and brought to the grocery store that had hired her. With the exception of one terrifying month when she could not get herself employed and lived off the generosity of Andy, Michelle always worked. But if she got a job in LA it would mean she really lived there.

She regarded the grimy used bookstore. She belonged there. If it were an animal it would be her power animal, if it were a spirit it would be her guide. If Michelle were a bookstore she would be that bookstore. If she waited and brought in the resume tomorrow, or even later that day, the universe wasn’t making any promises. But if she walked through the doors right then, employment was guaranteed.

Michelle’s psychic impulses were rare and useless. Once she had a precognitive wave that Linda would start brushing her teeth at work, and the very next day the girl shuffled in, hungover with a toothbrush and a fresh tube of toothpaste. I Knew You Were Going To Do That, Michelle said. Otherwise it alerted her to potential romantic threats. Finally her sixth sense was offering her some practical direction. She pushed open the doors and inhaled the cool scent of gently rotting paper.

I don’t want dick tonight, Lil’ Kim chanted over the sound system. Treat my pussy right. The boy behind the register shook his ass, bony inside his cargo shorts. Michelle passed him her resume and felt herself become hired, energetically. Two days later she had a job.

How’s LA? Ziggy asked. Her cell phone crackled, Michelle could hear air whooshing over the receiver.

What Are You Doing? Michelle asked. Are You Riding A Bike? The thought was hilarious. Michelle imagined Ziggy pedaling a ten speed, her hip accoutrements chiming and swinging, a cigarette clamped in her mouth, one hand steering the bike while the other pressed her cell to her head.

I’m driving a car. I got a grant and bought a bitch bucket.

You Got A Grant? Michelle gasped. Who got grants? People who wrote about long-ago trees, about ye olde beavers gnawing down long-ago trees in an extinct autumnal landscape, patting homes together with their flat, muddy tails. People who conjured the lost beauty of the natural world and made the reader feel bad about the state of things in a nostalgic, gentle way — that’s who got grants. Not Ziggy. Ziggy screamed her poetry. She had such ADD she couldn’t sit still long enough to type them into computers, she committed them to memory or else read them from the little wrinkled notebooks stuffed in the ass of her pants. Ziggy’s poetry was about the horror of men, about racists and fascists. The poems were graphic and mean and made everyone in the audience feel awful, complicit somehow, recalling every time they didn’t do the right thing, didn’t yell at the man punching the woman in the street, didn’t flip off the cops as they harangued a row of Latino teenagers on Mission Street. There were many such instances in a life, and listening to Ziggy, a warrior in her belts of metal, people resolved to have more courage, to fight harder for more freedoms. Ziggy’s work was thick with fucks and cunts and the defamation of the Christian God, and San Francisco had given her a grant.

What’s a Bitch Bucket? Michelle asked, jealous.

A Cabriolet. It’s a car. A little convertible. A Volkswagen .

You’re Talking To Me Now In A Convertible? On Your Cell Phone?

Yep. Ziggy’s breathing revealed that she was also smoking.

You Should Move Here, You’d Fit In Perfect.

How are you fitting in? Are you partying with celebrities or what?

I Saw Gwen Stefani At A Breakfast Place, Michelle reported. I Used The Bathroom After Her And My Wallet Fell Out Of My Back Pocket And Into The Toilet.

It’s like she christened it, Ziggy said.

For Real. She Hadn’t Flushed.

If it’s yellow, let it mellow, Ziggy said. There’s no more water. I donated the van to a water preservation organization. It would be a tax write-off if I did my taxes.

I Saw Marilyn Manson Walking Into A Bookstore With His Girlfriend, Michelle remembered. She Looks Like A Suicide Girl. They Were Holding Hands.

Was he hot? Ziggy probed. Did you say hi to him or get his autograph or give him your book or something?

He Was Tall, Michelle said, But I Think He Was Wearing Platform Boots. His Hair Is Really Long. I Only Saw Him From Behind. He Looked Like A Swamp Monster, Just Sort Of Lumbering And Leathery and Dark.

Hot, Ziggy declared. He was hot?

I Suppose.

What’s your problem? Ziggy asked. Remember when we saw him at the Cow Palace? When he came out from the stage crucified on a cross of television sets that burst into flames? And then he came out later like a four-legged beast on those stilts and then he stood up and put his arms in the air and he was like twenty feet tall and the strobe lights were going through him? Remember how good that ecstasy was, you almost didn’t take it and then it was so amazing, remember?