Michelle Tea - Black Wave

Michelle didn’t want to put Ted in a mental Rolodex of people who could get her heroin, but she did anyway. She couldn’t not. Her brain, it seemed, had its own secretary and she did her job diligently. Ted. Heroin. Never mind that Michelle had only just feared him smacking her across the jaw with the staple gun and burying her alive in a pile of old jazz records. Ted. Heroin. Michelle thought that the next time he came in she would tell him that she, too, was a writer. That she had written a book. She would ask him what he was working on. Michelle hadn’t met any writers in Los Angeles — no writers working on books, anyway, if that is what this Ted character did. Michelle bet he was writing a novel. Maybe even poetry. A junkie writer desperately selling a battered copy of Fight Club was probably not writing a movie. He was starring in it. Ted. Heroin.

Ted Threatened To Kill You? Michelle marveled.

Ted threatened to kill faggots. Apparantly he has no idea that I am one.

What Did You Do?

I kicked him out.

Michelle gazed at the glass front door, half expecting Ted to be out there, crazed, dope sick, sweating hate, a monster. Joey swished his hand.

Whatever.

Do We Have A Gun? Michelle asked out loud. Is There One Of Those Panic Buttons You Can Hit To Sound An Alarm If We Get Robbed?

You think Beatrice is stashing guns around here? Joey waved his lanky arms around his head. You want a gun to protect you from Ted? Ted is fine. He’s a fucking racist homophobe drug addict and he’ll probably kill himself off before the world actually ends. Certainly before he gets around to killing anyone else.

Michelle wasn’t sure. She was spooked at Junkie Ted’s pronouncement, even if Joey had decided to not take it too seriously. Joey had other problems. One of his roommates wanted to hang an American flag out the window and the other roommates didn’t. The proflag roommate was working-class and the others were upper-middle-class academics and it had turned into a class war.

Oh God, Michelle groaned, Flags. She had noticed them, too, suddenly everywhere, as if a national holiday had been declared, as if the country had triumphed in a sporting event. As if it were America that would die within a year and not the world. On her way to work she’d seen the sheet someone had hung out their front window, GOD BLESS THE USA gusted across it in spray paint. The other shops on the strip had obediently taped little flags in their windows. Beatrice, bless her heart, had refused, had placed her poem there instead, and a little peace flag, a cartoon image of a healthy planet, all blues and greens, with the hippie peace symbol on top of it. Michelle walked Junkie Ted’s book about Australia over to the window, torn between displaying its cover of the triumphant Sydney Opera House or the centerfold shot of an archaic white beach. She removed the Metallica album and handed it to Joey. He took it and swiped the peace flag, too.

Maybe I can get my housemates to compromise with this. He gave it a sad little wag.

It’s So Awful, Michelle said. The Planet Does Not Look Like That.

They might as well put a smiley face on it too, Joey agreed. He lifted his face into a stupid grin and marched in place, shaking the wistful flag on its little stick. The door jangled and a small, gray-haired woman walked in.

Judy , Joey greeted the woman, bowing at the waist, the peace flag held high.

Hold on to that flag, Judy said. We’re going to have a neighborhood vigil. That’s the flag we want. Peace on earth. Peace for the earth .

You want the flag? Joey asked. He thrust it at the woman. Take it. Beatrice would love for it to be in a parade.

A vigil, not a parade, she corrected sternly. A parade! There is nothing to celebrate. But we’ve got to get out there. We’ve got to let them know we’re watching.

Judy ran the Franklin Strip neighborhood group. She was real hustle-bustle. Michelle hated her. Judy always ignored her. When Beatrice had introduced them Judy had only glanced at Michelle impatiently, as if her presence was preventing an important conversation about permit parking from happening. Michelle had nodded awkwardly and retreated back to her project, organizing the messy Gay Fiction section in the far corner of the store.

Amazingly, Michelle had found a copy of her own book sitting there on the shelf, its orange spine familiar. PLAYLAND, the bold black letters read. Then, LEDUSKI. Michelle pulled it from the shelf. The inside had been signed, inscribed to someone named Betty. Thanks, Betty! She read her own familiar, cheerful scrawl. Great glasses! Enjoy the book! Michelle was at a loss when signing books. She always wanted to write something profound but wound up bursting with nervousness and etching a slight compliment about the reader’s appearance: Great glasses. I like your hair. Cool boots. She felt shallow and ashamed each time she closed the book and passed it back to the reader. Michelle tried to remember a Betty with glasses. Had she enjoyed the book as Michelle commanded? Perhaps not. Michelle turned the book in her hand, looking at the cover photo, a girl in a plastic miniskirt and combat boots clutching an upturned wine glass by its stem, the wine dribbling out, caught in droplets by the camera. Michelle couldn’t remember the girl’s name, only that Ziggy had been sleeping with her. Playland was about leaving your crazy East Coast family and coming to San Francisco to drink a lot and have sex in queer-bar bathrooms. It was about being young and experimenting with drugs and having lousy jobs. It was about Michelle’s life. Finding a copy lodged in the bookstore filled her with complicated feelings. She was proud of herself for being on the shelves, but she was only there because someone had read the book and not cared to keep it. Still, someone, Beatrice or Joey, had thought the cramped, overstuffed bookstore would benefit from the addition of it and they had acquired it. Maybe Betty with the great glasses had been an annoying junkie Joey had tossed a quarter at to get rid of her. Michelle was beginning to understand that a lot of the people peddling used books were, in fact, annoying junkies.

Michelle gave in to the specialness of discovering herself on a bookshelf and trotted up to Beatrice, still engaged in conversation with Neighborhood Judy. I Wrote This, she chirped happily.

Beatrice looked at her with her teary, reddened eyes. Allergies? Michelle wondered. The store was the dustiest place in the world. Motes swirled like a thin snowfall in the light coming through the windows. Really? Wow. She gave a little smile, returned to Judy who seemed to be holding her breath until Beatrice’s attention returned. Clearly, if the book had been any good Michelle would not be working in a bookstore.

Michelle could not adjust to the lowly status ascribed to bookstore workers in Los Angeles. In San Francisco, bookstore positions were coveted, highly competitive. Michelle had been rejected by bookstores for years, she had to actually publish a book before one would hire her. In San Francisco it was totally cool to work in a bookstore. You would starve to death because they only paid seven dollars an hour, but you would die cool. In Los Angeles you were not cool. You were a stupid counter person making little more than minimum wage in a town where people made millions of dollars a day. There was something seriously wrong with you. You were completely invisible. Michelle retreated to Gay Fiction, so far from the counter she could not hear Judy’s rantings, only watch the woman’s jerky gesticulations, like a marionette being operated by a fool.

Neighborhood Judy accepted the peace flag from Joey and trotted out the door, flyers advertising that night’s vigil fluttering in her wake. Joey kindly stuck one in the window, next to a Nostradamus book he’d slid in when Michelle wasn’t looking. Michelle watched Judy bounce purposefully up the strip in her bright white Keds.