Michelle Tea - Black Wave

Michelle shrugged. I Suppose.

Nothing to be ashamed of. Doesn’t make the love less real. It’s just your state. It’s a gift. Anyway, you’ll probably never love again, but just know that you would have. Just know that. Sayonara. The man lumbered out the door, exiting with the familiar chime. He was no longer her boss. Michelle looked around her workplace, the bookstore. She was a business owner. She owned a bookstore. It had ceased being a functional bookstore, of course, and was more of a strange library, a place for addicts and fragile people to come out of the killing sun and find some peace, maybe leave with a book or a dollar in their pocket. Michelle supposed it was becoming a sort of social service agency, which was not the worst thing.

She locked the door and grabbed the ring of keys from beneath the register. There were about fifty keys on it, all sort of grimy, stinking of metal. She rattled them in her hand as she walked to the back room, that corner of linoleum. She’d kicked it idly during lunch breaks, listening to the flick flick flick of it beneath her combat boot as she heated up leftover pasta in the microwave. She pulled it back and saw the cubby that had been created beneath it, found the solid safe, heaved it out with some difficulty.

On the twelfth key the top came off. Lots of money was inside. Michelle could imagine an earlier moment, maybe even last week, when finding such booty would have filled her with adrenaline, such joy, that she would have had to lie her body down on the floor and wait till the feelings passed into something functional. But the money looked oddly like any collection of anything. A box of seashells, a jar of marbles, a store full of books. Paul was right, all she really needed was food. She’d stopped paying rent and that seemed fine. She’d stopped drinking and cigarettes didn’t work without alcohol to both feed the compulsion and numb her of its grossness — the stink, her moist and yellowy fingers, the swamp in her lungs. Michelle needed hardly anything and now had more than enough to secure it for her. She took out a small bundle of cash and sunk the safe back into its cache beneath the floor.

Michelle had stopped drinking — because it was killing her. This story isn’t bound by what really happened, but Michelle’s sobriety in this book and in life is a rare moment of narrative resolution. She’d be a fool not to exploit it.

But telling it, really telling it, would be too much. Michelle tried to encapsulate it in a sort of montage, like Rocky Balboa training for his big fight. Flash, Michelle meditates. Flash, she overcomes a moment of craving. Flash, she learns how to pray. Flash flash flash she goes to a bunch of AA meetings and gets a sponsor, someone she can’t write about because of the anonymity thing. Actually, Michelle worries that writing about AA violates the anonymity thing.

Michelle could make Michelle get sober without AA, but that would encourage any alcoholics who deeply want to believe they can do it on their own. I mean, who wants to go to meetings in churches and listen to weird strangers who’ve ruined their life talk about God? Michelle didn’t. She, too, tried to get sober without AA and found that her twisted life minus the familiar coping tool of alcohol was more hellish than a hangover. She hadn’t known then that people went to AA to learn how to live. She thought it was a support group for losers who needed help with the fact that their life would never be fun ever again.

Michelle didn’t want it to seem like she was the rare person who could get sober and achieve actual sanity without AA. And Michelle thought it was weird that she could write a bunch of stories about being wasted all the time but then couldn’t write honestly about how she had become sober. But from here on out, Michelle doesn’t drink anymore.

I haven’t talked to you, Wendy said, her tone a bit hurt. You know they’re shutting down the telephone services. I wondered if you would even say goodbye to me. And your brother. I worry about you two, especially now with the world ending. You don’t know what it’s like to be a mother worrying about her children. It’s its own thing. You’ll never know. You’ll never know such worry, now. Michelle could hear her mom exhale smoke.

I Wouldn’t Have Known Anyway, Michelle said. I Never Wanted A Kid.

You say that, but I had a dream. One of those dreams everyone’s having. You had a baby, your brother had a baby, it was like we were all a real family.

Michelle hadn’t recalled seeing anything about a baby in Ashley’s files. But Ashley’s files, she realized, stopped at the end of her and Ashley’s relationship.

You really haven’t dreamed about the baby? Oh, it’s a cute thing.

Boy Or A Girl? Michelle asked.

Wendy snorted. You won’t say. In the dream. You give it some weird name so no one knows if it’s a boy or a girl and you say you’re going to just let the baby figure out what it is. Good thing the world is ending, huh? You’d have some kind of confused person on your hands if you did that.

It sounded like something Michelle would do, actually. Am I Alone, she asked, With The Baby?

No, no, you have some person, you know. She looks like a boy but she’s a girl. She’s good, I like her. She gives people a good feeling. You’re happy.

Really?

Yeah, really, you’re in love. You really haven’t dreamed about this?

No.

Well, you’re older in the dream. Kind of old to be having a baby. Maybe it hasn’t come yet.

I Was Thirty-Seven In My Last Dream, Michelle said.

Oh, no, you’re older than that in the baby dream.

Jesus, Michelle said. That Sounds Grotesque.

Well, how are you doing in the real world, huh?

In truth, Michelle was doing fine. Every morning she woke up in a different part of the bookstore. She dragged a pile of cushions onto a pile of books and slept there, like a child surrounded by toys. She slept upstairs in the stacks of cassette tapes, she slept in the break room above her hidden pile of money. Michelle opened and closed the bookstore depending on how she felt about humanity that day. She had to have an open heart to open the door. One afternoon a woman, batshit crazy, began hurling books at the wall, emitting a shrill keen. Michelle joined her. It felt fucking fantastic. Eeeeeeeeeeeeee! she trilled, the sound coming from deep in her throat. She chucked book after book at the wall, where they collided with other books, the lot of them tumbling to the floor to land in a pile of still more books. The woman stopped, just briefly, to see if Michelle was mocking her, but feeling safe in her insanity resumed her cries and hurls. She cackled and Michelle cackled back. Almost every day had a moment like that to open into, something totally apocalypse.

In the break room she made a lousy cup of coffee, regretting that she would probably never taste real quality coffee again, but grateful nonetheless for the caffeine. She would select a book and read it. She’d read in her pile of cushions, sneezing at the dust. She’d read behind the counter as if she were a normal girl at a normal workplace during a normal era, slacking off in a normal manner. She’d sit on the counter. She’d sit on the ladder or a chair. She selected books at random, ones she’d never heard of. Glory Goes and Gets Some. Car. The Speed Queen . She grabbed ones that made her think of San Francisco: Kevin Killian, Dodie Bellamy. She read the entire Tales of the City saga. She read books about Los Angeles: Kate Braverman and Mike Davis.