Black Wave (16 page)

4

Michelle's bookstore was owned by a husband-and-wife team. Beatrice was thin and wan and visibly repressed. She spoke in a hushed tone and seemed perpetually on the verge of tears. Sometimes Michelle wondered if Beatrice was in fact crying, the way her voice creaked and croaked and her eyes grew red and teary. Perhaps Beatrice had been so depressed for so long she had mastered the art of continuously weeping in public, a subtle sobbing that friends and customers chalked up to allergies or simply the state of her face. She was prone to migraines, and when her headaches came on she left Michelle alone in the vast bookstore. That was the best. Michelle would drift dreamily from pile to pile, lifting the grimy, sneezy books, reading a bit from this and a bit from that, Basquiat and Bukowski, lesbian anthologies from the 1970s, Margaret Mead and Carl Jung and
Hollywood Babylon
.

Beatrice's husband was sick with an esophageal disorder that sent acidic bile and undigested food rolling up his throat whenever he bent over. He would come to work in
spite of his distress to remind everyone of his kingly role. He would trail Michelle through the store, pointing to various things on the floor, having her bend and lift them. He was a bulky man and liked to linger in the kiosk behind the register. Michelle would be there too, and Beatrice, and mounds of books—books that had arrived that day in the arms of hopeful strangers, quality books, rare or antiquated, out-of-print or cult classics that the couple sold on eBay. No one in the kiosk could move. Michelle practically gave the husband a lap dance each time she came behind the register. It was hectic at the bookstore. Though it should have had the sleepy, cozy feel of a library, when the owners were around it felt like an ER, like a single detail might be being overlooked that would cause this empire of used paperbacks to crumble.

In thirty years of owning the store, the husband had never learned how to operate the cash register. Michelle felt this was all she needed to know in order to understand Beatrice and the source of her headaches. The husband possessed a vast knowledge of classical music recordings and that was his role in the operation, judging the quality of the classical records people came to sell and cultivating a community of classical music nuts to purchase them. Otherwise, he condescended and lorded over them and complained about his esophagus. His irritation was oddly exuberant, like he was an actor playing the part of the cranky bookstore jerk, long white hair cascading from his head and face. Sometimes he and Beatrice would fight and Michelle would be trapped there, hemmed in by the books, caught inside their dysfunctional relationship.

If Michelle hated working with the owners, she adored working with Joey, the gay manager who wore a do-rag
and had the lyrics to Lil' Kim's entire oeuvre memorized. Together they bided their time until the owners left, then swapped out the acceptable bookstore jams—Norah Jones, Aimee Mann—for Lil' Kim, Tupac, and Marilyn Manson. Working with Joey was fun, the most social activity Michelle was getting in Los Angeles, but she still preferred working alone, the time careening by as she lounged on a ladder with her nose in a book: Violette Leduc, Phoebe Gloeckner, Monique Wittig. The bookstore was a treasure chest, stuffed with books by publishers and writers who long ago had failed. This was the last place left to find them, a cemetery of sorts. It was her favorite place in all Los Angeles.

5

Michelle had placed her futon along the back wall of the studio's main room, flush against windows that overlooked the alley below. Cops routinely ousted homeless youth from the alley, barking at them in the night, waving their flashlights like kids at a rave. The windows looked directly into the apartment next door, occupied by a man with long gray dreadlocks who shopped at the bookstore. Joey claimed to see him picking up the rent boys who worked the ho stroll by the gay center. Joey knew all about the gay center and shared with Michelle its secrets—by day all the rich Hollywood A-gays had meetings and fundraisers inside the compound, but when the sun began to set the neighborhood seethed with rent boys and tweaker transgender women selling their ass. It was the first time Michelle felt interested in going there.

The man across the alley was roommates with a dog with a meaty head, a rottweiler. Drool came rainily from its lips. The dog would come to the window, slap his paws on the sill, and crane his head, barking at Michelle as if seeking
revenge. It was scary. Scarier still was when he propped himself in the window and simply watched her. He was like a monster or a man—a serial killer, a Peeping Tom. A large, intelligent animal considering you. Michelle would close the blinds, robbing the apartment of sunlight.

Michelle knew the placement of the futon was energetically wrong. She suffered nightmares of Kym and Wendy dying, of being stabbed in her sleep by killers who crept in through the rotting bathroom window. The position of the bed was wrong but there was nowhere else to put it. She had copied the layout of the woman who lived across the hall, after glimpsing her studio as she unlocked her door. In her apartment the sun felt soft, gentle, not murderous. The place was clean. It did not seem to have the pall of gloom that hung over Michelle's studio. Her neighbor's bed was backed up against wide, bright windows, inviting sunlight to pour over homey patchwork quilts, over ruffled throw pillows, over her cat—a cat that sprawled in the delicious glow, its tail twitching lazily. Wow, Michelle said, shamelessly peering through the door.

The woman smiled sheepishly and shrugged.
Yeah,
she said. Her cat was named Freedom and every so often the thing would escape and the woman would chase it down the halls yelling,
Freedom, no! No, Freedom! No, Freedom!

Everyone in the building seemed to be thriving in Los Angeles. A guy downstairs was a computer programmer who drove a VW Bug he'd painted to look like that Mondrian painting: blue and red and yellow. Upstairs was an aspiring actor with shiny hair who had helped Michelle and Quinn carry a couple of boxes upstairs the night they arrived, then generously offered them a line of cocaine. A golf punker named Tommy lived down the hall. His hair was a torture
chamber of perfectly straight spikes around his head, like a porcupine. He had created the ultimate styling gel for golf punkers, the Krazy Glue of hair products. Michelle hadn't been aware of golf punkers before moving to Los Angeles, but apparently it was a thing—there was even a store called Golf Punk. Golf punkers were rich kids who didn't think it paradoxical to enjoy their riches and familiar traditions of, say, golf, while also jamming out to punk music and adopting the aesthetic.

Michelle's next-door neighbor hung seasonal decorations on her front door, above a chirpy perennial sign reading Think Pink! As time wore on, Michelle watched the ornaments on the front door shift from summertime ladybug to goofy-toothed jack-o'-lantern to glittering plastic snowflake. Passing her door gave Michelle the sinking feeling of living in a college dormitory. Why did this woman feel the need to hang a sign instructing everyone to Think Pink? What did it even mean to Think Pink? Michelle came upon her once as she unlocked her accessorized door. Her Chiclet teeth stretched into a newscaster smile and her hair was a maroon color, a fake reddish purple that swung above her shoulders in a perky bob.

Boy, am I glad you moved in!
She greeted Michelle as if she knew her.
The last guy who lived in your place—ugh!
She flicked her hand around to ward off the evil past of Michelle's apartment.

What Do You Mean? Michelle inquired.

Oh, he was an alcoholic,
she said,
but a bad one. Real bad. And PCP too. They brought him out of here one night on a stretcher and there was blood everywhere. I don't know what he did. I don't know how they got it out of your carpet!
She chortled. Her door swung open, revealing a pale-pink temple of
single girlishness.
We'll have a drink sometime,
she promised.
I'll tell you all about it.
The door clicked shut behind her. Think Pink!

Michelle moped into her gruesome apartment. Had someone actually died here? Was that the vibe of wrongness she felt, the bad feng shui? Was the ghost of this man hunkered in the corner, drifting above the suspicious spots and stains, blotches that Michelle now knew to be blood, was he watching Michelle like the rottweiler across the alley, did he recognize her as a kindred spirit, another addict who had come to die, alone, in this miserable little piece of Hollywood?

6

What is this guy's problem? Michelle wondered, staring at a character outline of man-Michelle on her computer screen. He's got a great job and this house and stuff, and his wife is nice and his kids aren't deformed. Why is he so angsty? Is it just the human condition to be angsty? If so, why couldn't Michelle just be her queer feminist fuckup angsty self and be universal that way?

Don't be reactionary, Michelle scolded herself. The human experience is male. Okay. Does he have a problem with his father, aren't men always competing with their father or something? Michelle didn't have a father so she didn't know how to pursue that narrative. She cursed her lousy imagination. The real problem here was she just wasn't a very good writer. Okay. If this guy is going to do a bunch of drugs, what is it that he's trying to escape? The prison of masculinity? How sexism hurts men, too? Maybe he just wants to cry. Maybe he becomes a massive drug addict because the patriarchy won't let him cry, they'll call him a
fag and throw shit in his hair. He'd get fired from his job if he cried and would be forced into a life of crime and he'd get busted because nothing in his protected, middle-class existence prepared him for that. He'd end up in prison getting gang-raped till he shanked himself in the throat with a shiv made from a burned toothbrush.

Michelle could intuit the clear narrative trajectory of a man crying to his suicide in prison. This seemed promising. Maybe Michelle could actually keep the ideas that obsessed her—injustice, struggle, gender, feminism—but put them onto a man, thereby making them universal! Women have been trying to make feminism universal forever but had anyone ever thought of this? She would be such a hero! Michelle felt all fired up but it was probably just coffee. She felt herself sag as the caffeine peaked in her bloodstream and began its retreat.

All anyone would have to do is look at her, Michelle, the author, and her ulterior motives would become clear. The book would be deemed suspect, have an intention other than literary, be branded propaganda. For such a novel to succeed a man would have to write it.

Every female Michelle knew was writing memoirs, excavating dark childhoods and heartache. Michelle didn't know any men writing memoirs, but she also didn't know any men—other than trans men. Maybe she could write a memoir under a pen name, a man's name, infuse it with all the molestation and tragedy found in a common female memoir, and bam! a best seller, maybe. She could write a novel about a girl pretending to be a guy in order to write a successful book. Or a girl pretending to be a guy pretending to be a girl to stir up a sensational literary scandal. This was the terrible thing about fiction, Michelle could write
about whatever she wanted. She could write about dinosaurs mating with unicorns in the lost city Atlantis and some fool would read it. In the face of so many options she spun, paralyzed, overthunk. She just wanted to write a humble novella about a girl in love with a petulant genderqueer teenager, both trying to get their lives together in Los Angeles, but even if she were to convince Lu to let her do it, even if she fashioned a different Lu who never got low blood sugar or did drugs, who hadn't been raised in a household where everyone yelled at the mother, thereby learning that yelling at women was a great thing to do—even if Michelle worked all of this out, such a book would never cross over. She deleted the man-story she'd written.

Michelle closed her laptop. Maybe something was germinating inside her and she was fucking it up with all this obsessing over the perfect universal male narrator. She had an inkling of inspiration—maybe she could take her life and sort of superimpose it onto Wendy. Maybe an aging, crack-smoking, Bostonian psych nurse in a lousy relationship would be compelling to readers, maybe they would sympathize with her and not judge her drug use. That was the thing—people tended to judge drug abuse unless you were an imposing or hardy man and then they sort of reluctantly envied your daring. Still, the tragedy of Wendy was so compelling to Michelle, perhaps she could find a way to articulate it to a large audience and cross over and really be a writer then, be safe, have a future. Michelle thought about it. She sat in her kitchen late at night listening to the Smiths.

       
And when you want to live,

       
how do you start?

       
Where do you go?

       
Who do you need to know?

       
Oh . . .

Well, Wendy would have to be straight, for starters.

7

Michelle was drinking from a great big jug of wine. When the jug ran dry she would lie upon her futon and sleep. Except for the nights when she craved, really craved, another jug of wine. If she had emptied that first jug by a reasonable hour the Pink Dot would still be open and she could order herself another. Oh, the Pink Dot was so marvelous! Michelle didn't understand why all cities didn't have them, it had convinced her of Los Angeles's superiority—sorry, San Francisco. Yes, the earth is deader here than anywhere else on the planet, but facts are facts: in Los Angeles you could make a phone call, read the numbers from your ATM card, and forty minutes later a man would be at your door with liquor, cigarettes, and a dish of pasta in a takeout container. Los Angeles wins.

Michelle liked to order champagne. Though she might actually want another jug of Carlo Rossi Paisano, a sturdy bottle, wide and round, low-slung, like a lady pregnant with a belly full of wine, she ordered instead champagne. Champagne was less alcoholic. It was more celebratory,
performative. Michelle was taking on the persona of a slightly lunatic female drinking champagne at her kitchen table at three o'clock in the morning. There was a strength inside the tragedy of it, if you regarded it from the right angle and depending on what you wore. Drinking and smoking in a pair of sweats and a stained T-shirt was an obvious cry for help, but if Michelle teetered around her kitchen in a fluffy nightgown made in the 1950s, something pink and polyester with bits of lace and flowers, and over that wore a cover-up of sheer pink chiffon that floated out behind her when she clicked around in her golden mules, yes, mules, stuck with wavering bits of marabou—if you were wearing this and drinking champagne right from the bottle, well, something fabulous was happening! No matter that no one was there to see it. In such a getup, late-night binge drinking was acceptable.

Also, in addition to what you wore (finery) and what you drank (champagne, preferably pink, to match your finery), what you did while drinking alone late at night made the difference between alcoholic and artistic. Like if you sat at the window and cried because you had moved miles away from home and friendship and had nothing, if you were left only with the dregs of your personality, replaying everything that you had done wrong in your relationships, psychoanalyzing yourself, alternately blaming your parents and then feeling terrible and weak for blaming your parents—that would be really alcoholic.

But if you sat at your kitschy 1950s kitchen table and made a gigantic scrapbook out of your life's ephemera, turning your regret and sadness into a craft project, that was artistic. That was what Michelle did, in a thrifted nightgown, finishing off a bottle of wine she'd found on sale at
the Rite Aid earlier that day. The Rite Aid was at Hollywood and Gower, in a part of Hollywood called Gower Gulch. In days of yore, aspiring actors would hang out on the corner in cowboy gear, hoping to be picked up to work as an extra in a spaghetti western. The front of the drugstore was painted with murals of cowboys swinging lassos and pointing shotguns. Inside, Michelle bought ice cream. She loved Rite Aid's rocky road in a dense, square scoop on a cone. She also liked the discount red wine. She went to Rite Aid often.

Every photograph Michelle ever snapped went into her scrapbook. Photos of her singing karaoke with Andy one Christmas Eve, hours before becoming alcohol poisoned. Photos of Ziggy on New Year's Eve, topless at the queer bar, a metallic paper hat on her head, piercing needles and glitter stuck to her skin. A photo of Michelle outside her old house in a fake leopard fur coat—snow leopard—her clunky motorcycle boots, a cloth flower in her hair, looking at the camera with love in her eyes. Andy had been behind the lens. She pasted them into the scrapbook. Flyers for every event Michelle had gone to in the past ten years—benefits for sick dogs and bunnies, for Model Mugging, to save a failing queer business, to put a band on tour. Letters from people Michelle would never see again because she moved to Los Angeles. She would sit and drink and smoke out the kitchen window, her fingers growing gummy with glue stick, and when the glue stick went dry she moved to Scotch tape and when the roll spun out she switched to duct tape and then she was really drunk, about a half hour away from putting in a call to the Pink Dot—Think Pink!—for a bottle of celebratory champagne and another pack of blackout cigarettes. The scrapbook was a massacre of torn pages and fibrous slabs of industrial tape.

I'm making a scrapbook! Michelle thought. Michelle's mother Kym made scrapbooks. Michelle felt oddly close to her mother in those late hours, imagining Kym crafting through the heat of the New England night, also unable to sleep, smoking joints and pasting pictures of the past into tidy albums.

Michelle had moved to Los Angeles with three little suitcases packed with her personal memorabilia. She lifted piles of paper from the luggage onto the table and worked through the heap methodically. Smoke gusted from her mouth and fruit flies dive-bombed her glass of wine and died there, Michelle fished them out with a spoon. After a certain point she was too drunk and too obsessed with the scrapbook to remember to push the plastic cork back into the cheap jug of wine and the flies would invade the bottle, swiftly drinking themselves to death, becoming a raft of bodies floating on the surface. Michelle poured herself a fresh glass, straining the wine through a paper towel, making a bit of a mess, but the table was already so grimy with glue. Bits of snipped paper blew around like confetti. Michelle looked up and caught her reflection in the darkened kitchen window.

Is This Gross? she asked herself, wrinkling her nose at the paper towel full of dead flies.

In San Francisco Michelle had drunk nightly and long into the morning, but she did so among a community of drinkers and so nothing looked amiss. It was social, it was lively, it was what everyone did. In Los Angeles, cleaved from her drinking buddies, Michelle continued solo in her habits and found them to look a little different. Maybe a little pathetic

It's Not Any Different, she said grandly, raising a dollar-store
juice glass painted with a happy elephant. Wine and a stray dead fruit fly sloshed inside. It Is No Different Than Before.

Michelle pasted another smiling picture of herself into a notebook. She wondered, drunkenly, if she were perhaps dying, if she had lugged herself to the edge of the state to die like a dog alone on a cliff. Maybe she should dry out, go on a health kick. She had cut her drug intake drastically, no more heroin, no more cocaine. It had seemed fine for Michelle to keep drinking, but the scrapbook carnage before her on the table, the paper towel lurid with wine and the bodies of a hundred fruit flies, it looked worrisome, like a metaphor for a situation too awful to consider. Michelle vowed to put it away. She would learn to grill fish. Too late, no more fish left. She would learn what the healthy thing to grill was now and she would get it and she would grill it. She would wear moisturizer on her face and clean the house, put traps out for the roaches so she would not be forced to kill them with her fists each morning—that wasn't sexy, Michelle was letting herself go. This was how women got ruined. In the darkened bedroom the telephone rang. It was the Pink Dot. Michelle buzzed the delivery person into the building. She returned to the kitchen, the foiled neck of a champagne bottle golden in her hand.