Michelle Tea: Black Wave

One remarkable thing about Michelle is that she had two mothers and zero fathers. Her mother Wendy was a psych nurse at a New England hospital and her mother Kym had been a stay-at-home, pot-smoking mom. The moms had gone through a lot to be together. They weren’t big-city lesbians like Michelle and her friends, they had stayed close to the cities that birthed them, impoverished places full of xenophobia and crime. Boston was only across a bridge, but they didn’t go there. Wendy and Kym had come together in a windowless gay bar that most of the city of Chelsea, Massachusetts, was not even aware existed. It sat on the very outskirts of town by an ancient rusty drawbridge that led to East Boston. In its darkened space were some gay men. Wendy and Kym were the only other lesbians in the place and so they gravitated toward one another, found one another attractive, and were grateful to have hooked up so easily so close to home. No braving Boston and all its urban treachery to find love.

They settled into each other quickly and were soon disowned by their families. Wendy’s father declared that all his children had disappointed him — Wendy’s sister married a black man and her brother fathered a child at thirteen — and, declaring Wendy the final straw, cut off contact with his offspring. Wendy’s siblings resented her for this and so they were gone as well. Kym should have been so lucky. Her family chose to stay in her life and torment her, vacillating between bouts of antigay rage and a weeping martyrdom where everyone phoned in on behalf of Kym’s mother, who was literally dying of heartbreak and shame and needed Kym to get back to being straight, pronto.

But in recent years, much to her own horror, Kym had begun to think she maybe possibly perhaps wasn’t totally gay. She was certainly somewhat gay — absolutely. But she was also something else. At some point in her daughter’s young life, Kym had begun getting crushes on men in the neighborhood. The manager at the Salvation Army who looked the other way when she switched the price tags on furniture and appliances. The guy who worked the register at Store 24, where she bought candy when the munchies set in. The interchangeable men living unsatisfied lives with their own families up and down her dead-end street. They were the scariest. They stared at her a little too long when she pushed the stroller through the detritus-strewn neighborhood. They made such a big deal about being cool with lesbos that she knew they were all bigoted assholes. They winked at her and told her she was looking good. Kym was tall and lanky, her beauty sort of sunken, a tad masculine, odd the way that models were odd. Kym knew the guys in her neighborhood all thought she hadn’t found the right man yet, and her heart sank into her stomach and began to rot there, for what if they were right? What if there was a man for Kym, someone who thrilled her more than Wendy? Wendy had been such a thrill back in the day, a revelation, drinking wine straight from the bottle, her stained lips coming at Kym, her voluptuous body spilling wonderfully from her clothes like a foamy head on a great glass of beer. They had both believed in their love, a love so great their families had turned against them, driving them into one another with righteousness and fury.

Kym could not be the cliché, the horror of lesbians everywhere. She could not be the woman who went gay so dramatically, who even started a lesbian family and then bailed for the straight life. She was in too deep. There were other people involved, like Michelle, for god’s sake, and their other child, a fey boy named Kyle. The children had been tormented at school for having lesbo moms, and what did Kym tell them when they came home crying? She told them it was a gift to be different and that they should be proud and never buckle to the pressures of normalcy. How then could she abandon this family that was more like a political party or a grassroots nonprofit organization? How could she betray them in order to lie beneath the heaving, grunting body of some dude? She could not. She stopped leaving the house. She got really tired. Her head hurt and her appetite withered. She smoked more pot and the headache subsided, she nibbled at granola. The streets outside their small shingled home seemed to be crawling with virile men, each one a sexual fantasy, a bad porno waiting to happen. The pizza deliveryman. The plumber. A pair of fresh-faced Mormons making their conversion rounds through the neighborhood. Kym drew the blinds. Anxiety climbed her like a trellis. A doctor gave her pills and she ate them.

On the television Kym learned how the world was making people sick. People were reporting customized blends of fatigue, ache, anxiety, and depression. Their joints creaked and their blood seemed to sag in their veins. Some things throbbed while others went numb. It was suspected to be the Internet. It was suspected to be computers, generally. Probably it was chemicals, in particular the ones lodged in the air. It was the lack of water, how everyone was so dehydrated. It was time, which passed faster and, therefore, more abusively than it once had. It was the death of God. It was how meaningless everything was. It was the lack of trees and foliage, it was the animals made extinct and the sludge of the sea. It was all the wars being fought in far away places so that Kym could crank the air conditioning one more month, then another, then, thank god , another. It was the heat. It was the heavy rains and the black mold festering in the walls like a tormented psyche. It was Compound Environmental Malaise. No one knew how to treat it. Naturopaths recommended marijuana, so Kym kept smoking. Western medicine prescribed pills and so (to cover all bases) Kym ate them. There were support groups but Kym didn’t like to leave the house. Wendy found her an online group, but using the Internet to get support for an illness rumored to be caused by the Internet felt counterintuitive and Kym declined. Only the television seemed safe. Television had been around forever and no one had gotten sick from it. Kym longed for the yesteryear of landlines, heavy phones whose cables and wires rooted into the ground like plants. Safe things, not these teeny little cell phones transmitting cancers.

Kym had the television, the couch, and some pot. She had Wendy, who kindly pretended that everything was normal and did not force Kym to reckon with the probable psychological core of her malaise. Lesbians had long been at the forefront of environmental illnesses, shaming people for wearing scents since the 1970s. It was practically a political stance. She knew Wendy would stand by her.

It was the annual Youth Poetry Slam Championship. Michelle and Ziggy were invited to help score the performances and select a winner. They were shocked to be found respectable enough to be allowed around young people, and flattered that anyone thought they were so expert on poetry as to be able to form a wise opinion. But also they were sad, and confused. Did this mean they weren’t youths anymore? It is so hard for a queer person to become an adult. Deprived of the markers of life’s passage, they lolled about in a neverland dreamworld. They didn’t get married. They didn’t have children. They didn’t buy homes or have job-jobs. The best that could be aimed for was an academic placement and a lover who eventually tired of pansexual sport-fucking and settled down with you to raise a rescue animal in a rent-controlled apartment. If you didn’t want that — and Michelle and Ziggy didn’t, not yet, anyway — you just sort of rolled through the day, not taking anything very seriously because life was a bit of a joke, a bad one.

We Are Adults, Michelle said to Ziggy. That’s Why We Are Up Here And Not Down There.