Black Wave (20 page)

11

On the second day of the end of the world, Michelle changed into something worthy of a run-in with Matt Dillon and left for work through the back door, passing through a small, sad square of concrete that functioned as a sort of pathetic backyard. Little green shoots came up through the rocky gaps in the pavement. Seasons of dead leaves moldered along the perimeter. Sometimes homeless kids slept there in the afternoons, protected by the building's constant shade.

Turning the corner, Michelle walked along a stretch of sidewalk owned by the Scientologists. They had landscaped the walkway with those expensive fake plants, they trusted that the scant foot traffic of Los Angeles would prevent them from being messed with but Michelle couldn't resist. She would pluck a single yellow orchid blossom from its stalk and vivisect it as she strolled, wondering at the plasticky fibers, the cool gloss of the petals. They felt so real but they weren't. She kept the stolen flower low, they were as protected as endangered plants had once been. She couldn't
afford to replace even a bud and didn't need to get hauled into court by a bunch of Hollywood Scientologists.

Michelle stuffed the shredded flower in the pocket of her cutoffs and watched the Scientologists dash in and out of their compound. She especially appreciated the maids, who wore real, old-fashioned maid uniforms, black and white with little aprons and nursing shoes. Michelle longed to get a job at the Scientology Celebrity Centre, cleaning the rooms of visiting celebrities while wearing such an adorable costume, but she knew they would never hire her. The Hollywood sign sat wearily on the dead grass, a wavering mirage in the smog. Michelle entered her bookstore.

Beatrice was already there. Every day Michelle had to tell some customer that Beatrice was not a Scientologist, that their store was not a Scientologist bookstore, though they did keep a lot of dictionaries on hand because new Scientology recruits came in daily, having been instructed to go out and buy themselves a dictionary. The customers remained skeptical about Beatrice's affiliations. Really, Michelle would insist, She's Just An Old Hippie. In San Francisco there were a million ladies like Beatrice, but here in Los Angeles she was such a rare breed people thought she belonged to a cult.

Beatrice had written a poem about the wonders of the world and had hung it in the front window. Michelle's project that day would not be her regular Sisyphean task of finding space on the buckling bookshelves for yet more books, but to find art books containing photos of some of the planet's high points. Waterfalls, canyons, mountain peaks swathed in mystical clouds. Beaches with gentle, curling waves—nothing too awesome, we didn't want to make
people think about the coming tsunami. Just lush canopies of glossy leaves and flowers as big as your head. Jungles and fields of flowers, forests and the tiny bear cubs that clawed honey from the beehives that dangled from branches.

Never mind that most of these things had been gone for some time. Beatrice was in the grip of an anxious nostalgia and she was paying Michelle an hourly rate to indulge it. She also had a migraine. And her husband's esophagus wasn't operating right. She left the shop soon after installing the poem behind the glass. Michelle got to work culling books from the cramped Art section.

Joey stopped by briefly to place a copy of Metallica's
Kill 'Em All
in the window beside the poem. She's Not Going To Think That's Funny, Michelle said. She Has Me Looking For Pictures Of Rainbows And Pine Forests. She'll Take It Out.

Yeah, well,
Joey said sadly, with a small smile and a smaller shrug. The more Michelle worked with Joey the more he revealed and the more she enjoyed him. He was intensely mystical, new age, belonged to some faggoty men's group that gathered in the desert and did man-witch activities. He had the important retail skill of being able to make fun of a customer to their face without them knowing it. He had a knotty, gnarled scar running up his torso from his big New York City drug overdose.
Someone was in here earlier and said there was nothing to stop him from going out and killing a bunch of, um, “faggots and niggers” is what he said. That he'd just be beating the government to it.

Oh My God, Michelle said. Who? Who Said That?

Ted
, Joey said.

Ted, a regular bookseller, a white guy in his forties who didn't brush his hair, who wore a track suit into the store
every day to try to unload old paperbacks and cassette tapes. Though his offerings sucked, he acted like he was offering them a first edition of
Catcher in the Rye
.

I Can't Buy This, Michelle recently wagged a busted mass-market paperback at him, the pages yellowed as if urinated upon, the whole book looking sort of exploded.

How about this?
The man loaded a dingy hardcover photography book about Australia onto the counter, followed by a Chuck Palahniuk with a torn front cover.

We Have Three Copies Of That Already, Michelle shook her head. Sorry. It was like the “sorry” you gave to a person spare-changing you on the street, only worse because Ted felt like he was working for it, really working, and you were withholding his rightful pay. He dumped a small bag of cassette tapes onto the rejected books. Red Hot Chili Peppers, Journey, Mariah Carey. The Mariah Carey was a cassingle. We're Not Really Buying Cassettes, Michelle said uneasily. The man was glowering at her. His face was speckled with a five o'clock shadow, like a snickerdoodle that had been rolled in cinnamon sugar. He glowered at Michelle with a face she realized was desperate. Not a pleading desperate but a harder, resentful desperate. A desperation that knew itself to be pathetic and hated you for seeing it, for refusing to do the little you could to relieve it, buy the fucking Red Hot Chili Peppers cassette, what the fuck do you care anyway? It was a standoff. Michelle decided the best way to deal with the situation was to pretend she didn't notice how completely unhinged Ted was. She shrugged, allowed a goofball grin to hit her face. She would not recognize his desperation. She would give him the dignity of her feigned obliviousness.

She wished someone, anyone, was in the store. Beatrice,
her useless husband, Matt Dillon. The store took up half the block, the building was not only the gigantic shop with its many miniforts of books and rolling carts stacked with slowly warping opera albums, beyond that cavernous room smelling of the slow rot of pages and glue was a side room stuffed with more books, books too good for the store, to be sold on eBay or at antiquarian book fairs. And the side room had its own little side room with more hoarded crap, maybe a bathroom. There was the break room at the far end of the store with a staircase leading to an upstairs room containing every cassette ever recorded. Michelle was confident they had multiple copies of that Red Hot Chili Peppers cassette stashed in the upstairs room.

The wide store was empty of people, ringing with the bad vibes of this one customer. There were a million places he could stuff her body after he raged on her. He could jam her into a bookshelf, wall her up with
Star Trek
paperbacks and no one would ever find her. The guy ran a pork-chop hand through his dark hair. His hair was black and sleek and shiny except for the textured gray hairs that sprung in a tough fuzz of swirls across the top. He ran his hand through his hair and slammed it on the pile, cracking a cassette case. Michelle had wished desperately for Joey and, miraculously, he appeared.

Ted,
Joey sang in a bored tone, clapping the psychopath on the back. Joey was so good at the casual bro-down, half the customers didn't even get that he was gay, despite his intense nellyness.

Hey man, can you buy some of this shit?

Joey flipped the merchandise around on the table, landing on the blasted paperback.
Two bucks.

Dude. Just give me five and I'll give you everything.
Michelle
rolled her eyes. Like the asshole was doing the shop a favor, dumping a pile of garbage on the counter and charging them five bucks for it. Michelle didn't know why she cared so much. It wasn't her money. She realized that she'd become identified with the bookstore.

Joey dug five bucks out of the register. The dude thanked him with a fist-bump, stuffed the bill in his tracksuit, and strode out the door, his plasticky clothing making an airy noise. The bell roped to the door clanged as he left. He'd begun ignoring Michelle the minute Joey had arrived and had never looked at her again.

I'm Sorry, Michelle said to Joey, motioning to the pile of crap on the counter. She was shaken by the whole thing and didn't know where to project her riled energy. I Didn't Think I Should Buy Any Of It.

You shouldn't,
Joey affirmed.
It's shit. But whatever. I wanted to get rid of him. He's a writer and he's got a heroin problem and he'll stick around haggling forever. I just felt like I would rather pay him five dollars than deal with him.

The guy was a junkie. A writer with a heroin problem. In Los Angeles Michelle had learned of the sources of other drugs. There was a meth trade near the gay center, a trans woman sold it or you could get it from the taco truck or from a deadbeat donut shop, all within a one-block radius. Michelle suspected Tommy the golf punk sold club drugs, and Joey, who treated his heroin addiction with weed, could hook her up if she desired. But this was the first sign of the availability of heroin, this surly asshole Ted. Many times Michelle had longed for the vinegar sting of the stuff as it tunneled through her nose, the strange drowning sensation as it hit her sinuses. Michelle knew she had run out of San Francisco three steps ahead of a physical habit—that
was the point of Los Angeles, sort of. She'd wanted to stop doing so many drugs, and she had.

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.