Black Wave E-Book

Michelle Tea

• Herausgeber: And Other Stories
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 440

Beschreibung

Grungy and queer, Michelle is a grrrl hung up on a city in riot. It's San Francisco and it's 1999. Determined to quell her addictions to heroin, catastrophic romance, and the city itself, she heads south for LA, just as the news hits: in one year the world is Officially Over. The suicides have begun. And it's here that Black Wave breaks itself open, splitting into every possible story, questioning who has the right to write about whom. People begin to dream the lovers they will never have, while Michelle takes haven in a bookshop, where she contemplates writing about her past (sort of), dating Matt Dillon (kind of), and riding out the end of the world (maybe).New from Michelle Tea, novelist, essayist, and queer counter-culture icon, Black Wave is a punk feminist masterpiece and a raucously funny read for everyone … except, perhaps, for Scientologists.

Leseprobe

“I worship at the altar of this book. Somehow Michelle Tea has managed to write a hilarious, scorching, devastatingly observed novel about addiction, sex, identity, the nineties, apocalypse, and autobiography, while also gifting us with an indispensable meditation on what it means to write about those things—indeed, on what it means to write at all. A keen portrait of a subculture, an instant classic in life-writing, a go-for-broke exemplar of queer feminist imagination, a contribution to crucial, ongoing conversations about whose stories matter, Black Wave is a rollicking triumph.”

—MAGGIE NELSON, The Argonauts

“Black Wave is definitely Michelle Tea’s most fearless book. Charles Dickens—sharp and attentive to the morose and glittering detail like always, yet Black Wave threatens to take everything and everybody down. It’s Michelle Tea’s apocalyptic book and I was unable to put it down for fear I no longer felt sure of what was out there beyond my reading, so destabilizing and palpable is this bad fairytale come true. It’s a radically honest and scary book. And trust me, it’s a bloody and wonderful place Michelle has spun, fantastic, dark, and entirely awake. It shook me up.”

—EILEEN MYLES, Chelsea Girls

“Early in Black Wave, Michelle Tea’s new novel, her protagonist, also named Michelle, lingers over her books. The list—including Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Allison, Eileen Myles, Chris Kraus and Mary Gaitskill—perfectly suits Michelle, a 27-year-old in San Francisco’s Mission District circa 1999: It’s a Gen-X queer girl’s version of the bohemian counter-canon.

Although Tea doesn’t name-check herself, there might well be a Michelle Tea book on that shelf. For 20 years, Tea has recorded the history of her communities—writing novels, memoirs and essays, editing anthologies, founding a performance series and a publishing imprint. She has written about growing up working-class and the struggle for trans inclusion at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival … Part fictionalized memoir, part apocalyptic fantasia, Black Wave blends dark humor with touches of mysticism to suggest how misleading the phrase ‘settling down’ is … Like the New Yorkers of James Baldwin’s Another Country, Tea’s bohemians are not refugees from middle-class propriety: Sexuality and poverty cast them out from the start. They stake everything on passionate, toxic bonds because they have nowhere else to go. Baldwin’s novel, published in the early ’60s, is filled with tragedy. Tea’s is filled with humor—and also with a determination to find a nontragic end that doesn’t rely on the traditional formulas.”

—LAURA TANENBAUM, New York Times

First published in the UK by And Other Stories in 2017

www.andotherstories.org

First published in 2016 by the Feminist Press at the City University of New Yorkxs

Copyright © 2016, 2017 by Michelle Tea

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transported in any form by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book.

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN 978-1-908276-90-2

eBook ISBN 978-1-908276-91-9

Typesetter: Tetragon, London; Typefaces: Linotype Swift Neue and Verlag; Cover Design and Illustration: Rose Stallard; Printed and bound by the CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

And Other Stories is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

For Beth Pickens

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

San Francisco

Los Angeles

Acknowledgments

About the Author

1

Michelle wasn’t sure when everyone started hanging out at the Albion. She had managed to pass the corner dive for years without going inside, simply noting the dank, flat-beer stink wafting from its open doors, catching the glow of the neon sign hung above the bar—SERVICE FOR THE SICK—in hot, red loops. It seemed that all the other dives had been purchased and repurposed, renovated and sold to a different clientele. The purple-lit bar where middle-aged, working-class bulldaggers nursed beers at the counter was, overnight, converted into a heterosexual martini bar where men who smoked actual cigars drank chocolate martinis and harassed the women who passed by on Valencia. It was 1999.

Aside from the neon sign glowing its sinister pronouncement, the Albion’s other notable fixture was Fernando, a man who wore a mullet and a leather vest and carried a brown paper bag, the sort a mother will pack her child’s lunch in. It contained cocaine heavily cut with baby laxative. Michelle and her friends would pool their resources and walk into the women’s restroom with Fernando, who would tear a page from the stack of Cosmopolitan and Glamour in the corner, origami it into a little envelope, and dip it into his sack of drugs. The rumor on Fernando was that he used to work for the government, the FBI or the CIA, and was so hooked up with the most corrupt corners of the system that he was immune from being busted. Everyone felt very safe buying drugs from Fernando in the women’s restroom at the Albion.

Oh, Valencia, Michelle mourned. Michelle was a poet, a writer, the author of a small book published by a small press that revealed family secrets, exposed her love life, and glamorized her recreational drug intake. Her love life and recreational drug intake had been performed up and down Valencia Street, the main drag of San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood, once Irish, then Mexican, later invaded by a tribe bound not by ethnicity but by other things—desire, art, sex, poverty, politics. For six years Michelle had lived adjacent to this particular strip of gentrification and resistance, of commerce and SRO hotels and boutiques and taquerias. And, of late, it had changed. The Chameleon, a bar hung with velvet clown paintings, where Michelle had read her first poem to an audience, was no more. The poem had been awful, a melancholy love poem delivered in poetry voice, that stilted, up-toned lilt. She had compared her lover to a desert and her heart to a piece of cactus fruit busted up on the dusty ground. She had feared the poem was bad but rationalized that bad art had its fans and that her shabby offering would find its people. And at the close of the open mic a meek young lesbian had brought her shaved head over to Michelle and shyly thanked her.

Michelle had a special place in her heart for the Chameleon, its stage painted sloppily with giant orange flames. Its poetry event was famously unruly—all the poets were alcoholics, slamming each other in the head with chairs like professional wrestlers. That bar was Michelle’s first home in San Francisco, when she moved there from New England. She had enjoyed playing the part of the quick-witted and enraged baby dyke, she loved to clamber up to the microphone and holler at the drunks to Shut The Fuck Up! before launching into a spoken-word diatribe against pornography and child molestation. She did it well enough that the drunks stayed quiet, gave her a grudging respect afterward. When she bound her rants into xeroxed manifestos they bought them, and Michelle traded their damp dollars at the bar for pints of beer. The Chameleon was its own ecosystem, but the owner had fallen into a crack habit and so the business went under. Some French people bought it and renamed it Amnesia, as if Michelle would forget. It was so perfect it was cruel, the new name. Amnesia. Michelle marveled at it.

It seemed to be sweeping the Mission, amnesia. Every time Michelle blinked a familiar place had shimmered into an alien establishment. The Casanova had retained its name but gotten a new crowd, people Michelle had never before seen in her neighborhood. They looked like they had jobs, and money. Restaurants she could not afford to eat in were luring people from other enclaves, people once too frightened to visit the Mission, where people sold drugs and shot at one another with guns. These new arrivals wore clothing that had never been worn by anyone but them, clothing they would tire of and donate to the Salvation Army, where Michelle would buy it and wear it on this very street a year from now. There was a chain here, a cycle, Michelle could sense its churn. Anyway, the Mexican families who had been there forever had watched Michelle and her scrappy ilk invade the streets years earlier, artists and queers, damaged white people bringing dumpy coffee shops and these poetry bars. Why did she think her world wasn’t supposed to change?

Michelle pondered the question of her changing neighborhood in the darkness of the Albion, the last dive standing. A place where a cockroach once lost its grip on the ceiling and tumbled onto her notebook. A place where her checkbook was once stolen by a crackhead. Her black army bag had been slung over the back of her chair and the man was sitting behind her. Michelle had seen him and noted the scrawniness of his physique, the bug of his eyes, his cheekbones like broken glass threatening to slice through the skin of his face. Michelle played it cool. The Albion was the kind of place where one fraternized with crackheads. Go get a fucking appletini at Blondie’s if you can’t handle it, yuppie. Michelle could handle it. She gave the crackhead a nod of camaraderie—weren’t they both high on the same substance, after all? Michelle, a white girl, took her cocaine heavily cut with the aforementioned baby laxative in an inhalable line. This gentleman, African American, bought his in the smokable rock configuration. Michelle knew there were currently people in academia writing papers about this. If the man had hung around any longer she might have even bought him a beer, depending on the bonhomie quality of that evening’s cocaine, but the gentleman dipped his trembling hand into Michelle’s bag, snatched her checkbook, and took off before the bartender kicked him out. The Albion did not officially condone crack smoking. They would eighty-six you for firing your pipe in the bathroom, yet the bar had a resident cocaine salesman and people brazenly cut lines atop the glass of the pinball machine. Michelle did not condone this hypocrisy. Total bullshit.

Michelle had smoked crack cocaine only once and did not find it enjoyable.

She and her friends had been playing pool at the lesbian bar when a man with a tear tattooed beneath his eye wandered in. The man had been in prison for many years, last time he’d been free the lesbian bar had been a Mexican bar. He was confused but thirsty, and so he purchased a beer and played a game of pool with Ziggy and Stitch. Ziggy’s hair was orange as a traffic cone. She was an ex-junkie medicating her addiction with uppers and booze. She was a poet who enjoyed yelling her verse and a cook employed by the finer restaurants in San Francisco. When Ziggy got drunk her spatial cognition tanked and her lips got very wet. She would corner you in an intense conversation, keeping you pinned with her sharp green eyes, licking her lips. Michelle was into it, she loved intense conversations and getting drunk made the whole world feel severe and profound, teeming with wonder and pain. She enjoyed the company of others who could feel it—drunks and poets, mainly.

Stitch, Michelle’s housemate, was also swapping more dangerous addictions for controlled alcoholism and the occasional cocaine indulgence. A few years back, she had transitioned from femme to butch and became everyone’s project. Established butches made donations of well-worn Jack Daniel’s T-shirts. Older femmes groomed her to their liking, gifting her with outsized belt buckles and other late-nineties accessories.

The two butches played pool with the ex-con while Michelle, who hated pool, hung around sipping drinks and watching the sun go down outside the bar’s open door. The hue of the sky was the visual equivalent of the alcohol settling into her body—dusky blue shot with gold and darkening to navy. San Francisco, like many cities, had become a vampire town. The killer sun charged the pollution in the skies into a smoggy cocktail. By day, people darted from shelter to shelter like roaches stunned by sudden light, visors like riot gear shading their faces, SARS masks strung across their jaws, parasols arcing above their melanoma-spotted heads. Places of commerce opened later and later. Business visionaries inverted the workday. It was predicted that by 2010, nine-to-five would be fully replaced by five-to-nine. If everything lasted that long.

Michelle had arrived at the bar at sunset, still sleepy. The first rush of booze perked her up, the sugar infusing her with a pleasant mania before it released her into that darker, confused place where her mind became a sea that consciousness bobbed about on, rolling with the waves of passion and opinion.

Just then, a marauding band of already-drunk yuppies crashed into the bar and made a flamboyant fuss over the ex-convict’s inky teardrop tattoo—Oh my god were you in JAIL did you KILL someone? As they swarmed him, Michelle and her friends were there to tell them to back the fuck off. The three of them were just drunk enough to enjoy a righteous fight, all were perpetually pissed about the changes the neighborhood was experiencing. All three knew someone who was now making thousands of dollars playing foosball and drinking energy drinks in the break room of an Internet start-up, and all three knew someone who’d been evicted from their home to make room for a foosball-playing young millionaire. Ziggy, on the verge of eviction for months now, had sabotaged the sale of her home once already by running around the apartment half-naked with a dildo strapped to her hips when a speculative realtor came calling.

What, the gang demanded of these offensive yuppies, were they even doing in the queer bar? Were they even queer? The invaders wobbled over to the corner of the bar to regroup, and Ziggy, who spoke some shitty Spanish, asked the man with the tattoo if he could find them cocaine. He could. The trio stormed out of the bar. Michelle wondered briefly if it was a good idea for the man, only just released from prison, to be sourcing illegal drugs for a passel of queer white girls, but decided to go with the flow. It would be an experience, and Michelle was a writer.

As they cruised the Mission in Ziggy’s beat-up molester van—the windows blackened, the doors warped as if gangs of kidnapped children had tried to batter their way out—Michelle felt proud that she and her friends knew the proper and respectful way to hang out with a recent ex-convict with a teardrop tattooed on his face. The world was bigger than it had been ten minutes ago, a rabbit hole into which they could all tumble. The man was very good-looking, with a prison-yard physique, short hair, and a sort of humility. He hopped from the van on Capp Street and returned with his fist clenched around the drugs. He opened his palm.

No! Ziggy exclaimed. Coca, coca! She shook her orangey head at the substance he’d procured. This is crack. She laughed, a rueful snort. Ziggy wore a pair of goggles with lenses the same shade as her hair. She wore them strapped to her skull, just above her forehead, keeping her Kurt Cobain bob out of her face. It was like a butch headband. Ziggy’s teeth were so bad from her poverty and drug use they tumbled about in her mouth like a handful of chipped marbles. I love crack, she said sadly, and piloted the van to an empty lot in Hayes Valley, stopping briefly to purchase a special pipe off a lady crackhead on Mission. Michelle wondered for a second if there were diseases to be caught from the burned glass pipe of a career crackhead, but she had learned that fearful questions in such situations could lead to racism, to classism, to all sorts of unevolved and judgmental states of mind, and so one did not think too hard. One just accepted the chipped pipe with its charred bowl and one inhaled. And then one slid open the van door and puked onto the pavement, because crack is repulsive.

Outside the van, vines threaded themselves lushly through a chain-link fence and the parked cars sat soft, reflecting soft streetlights. It was 1999 and the earth’s decline was accelerating. Most native plants and trees were gone, leaving hardier invasive species. This one had leaves like wide, flat elephant ears, their green sheened with gloss. It had no business growing in San Francisco, but Michelle, hungry for green, appreciated it. Kids growing up now wouldn’t know any better, but Michelle had been raised among oak trees and maples, linden trees that perfumed summer nights. The town that had borne her was a shitty one, but back then even a shitty town had trees. Now even nice neighborhoods barely had a garden.

Michelle was too drunk to feel a single inhalation of crack. She leaned back in the van and watched Ziggy and Stitch fight over it—like, who was holding the pipe too long, who was owed their next hit, who had dropped a crumble of rock into the van’s carpeted shag and needed to fucking find it, now. Michelle had indulged in drugs with her friends many times and never had she seen such fiendish behavior. It was disturbing to see them acting like such dopeheads. Then Ziggy and Stitch began fooling around with the ex-con. They took turns making out with him. He was cute enough, and Michelle knew how it was to be all fucked up with no one to make out with. Ziggy and Stitch weren’t going to make out with each other—that would be gross. Michelle would be gross as well, maybe grosser. They were family. With his face stuck to Ziggy’s, the man’s hand slithered over and landed on Michelle’s leg, only to be smacked off by Stitch. Not her, Stitch snapped.

He gave Michelle a sincere apology, the inky tear suspended beneath his hangdog eyeball, and returned to Ziggy. He had only wanted Michelle to feel included, but Michelle wasn’t butch enough to mess around with men. It would be simply heterosexual, and slutty. For Ziggy and Stitch it was something else, proof of their toughness. They could tumble around with this guy and emerge from the van as queer as ever, more queer, even, and the man might now in fact be a bit queer from his time spent cracked out in Ziggy’s butch bosom. Ziggy smacked the man lightly in his face and they both smiled. Radical was the order of the day and it was not radical for Michelle, with her normal girly gender, to fool around with a guy. It would be a normal, boring, sell-out thing to do. But Ziggy and Stitch, both of them looking, acting, dressing, and smelling like boys, could do anything they wanted and be radical. They brought their radicalness into every situation and radicalized it with their presence.

Michelle caught a ghost of her reflection in the dark van window—blue hair, a bit fried from the effort. Bangs fringed her forehead, uneven, hacked off at home with a dull pair of scissors. Her kelly-green pleather coat was one of Stitch’s femme castoffs. She wore an orange slip as a dress, the tucks in the chest stitched for a woman more voluptuous than she. Its lacy neckline ballooned around her scrawny sternum. Alcohol bloat plumped her cheeks. A leopard scarf was knotted around her throat. She wore motorcycle boots on her feet, so heavy, every step demonstrating gravity. It was the end of the century.

Michelle stretched out on the van floor, leaning against the bench seat in the back, teetering between boredom and discomfort. As a writer, Michelle was happy to have smoked the crack. Having been unable to get it together and apply to college, she knew her literary education would happen on the streets. The streets were like the ocean—full of trash and beauty, and no one had the right to say which was which, not at this late date. Michelle would sit on the curb and illuminate what the tide pulled in.

Ziggy was an expert drunk driver. She took corners fast and loose, coming up on two wheels and returning to four with the grace of a pilot touching down on the tarmac. Soon Ziggy would tire of this escapade and drive her and Stitch home. Until that happened, Michelle knew her friends would make sure their new acquaintance didn’t slide his hand up the underwear she was trying to pass off as a dress. She could relax and space out, attempt to locate the effects of the drug in her body, elusive beneath the familiar roll of liquor. She yawned and checked “smoke crack” off her to-do list. The van rumbled to her door as the rumor of morning began to glimmer in the sky. Michelle felt relief. Nights she fell asleep before the sun came up were good nights. It meant that her life was under control.

2

That afternoon Michelle woke up on her futon craving a salt bagel and an Odwalla, the inside of her mouth an apocalypse, same as always. The sun blasted her windows, the dirt on the glass more a curtain than the shreds of gauzy fabric she’d hung over the panes. A carousel of flies buzzed in drunken circles in the air above her bed. It was past noon. Stitch had left for work hours ago to teach children at a Montessori school. Ziggy, she figured, would sleep until sunset, wake up in a shame spiral, and clean her room the way men at car washes detail their sports cars—anxiously, thoroughly, washing the narrow ledges of baseboard with a vinegar-soaked rag. Color-coding her sock drawer. Superstitious cleaning, its intent to ward off demons obvious. Once Ziggy’s room was clean she would roast an organic chicken or something. She would make plans to hang out with her other friends—people she knew from Minneapolis, people their age who seemed bizarrely older because they owned a house or were trying to get pregnant or managed a Starbucks in the Financial District. They were nice people but Michelle couldn’t relate to them. Whenever they got together, usually for something in Ziggy’s honor, Michelle felt prickly, like she was in junior high again, eating dinner at a classmate’s house, getting judged by her classmate’s parents. She felt buttons become latched around her personality, she reigned herself in. Her eyes swooped down regularly to make sure her boobs weren’t falling out of whatever lingerie she was pretending was a shirt. Michelle’s boobs were so small they should not have been able to fall out of anything, which said much about the state of her wardrobe. Michelle would be stiff and quiet through the gathering until she began to drink, and then she would get in a fight with the woman who managed the Starbucks.

Ziggy would spend the rest of the month with these adult friends. The memory of the crack and the convict, the brutality of the hangover would all fade, and Ziggy would call Michelle, and Michelle would soon find herself in a bathroom with Ziggy, the din beyond the locked door a low roar, and they would do some drugs together and burst out into the mayhem. They would begin anew.

Stitch, too, would briefly change her ways. She would monitor her immune system nervously, feeling up her throat for lumps. She would gargle with salt water and pop supplements. She would eat niacin and flush red as it burned the toxins out from her skin. The foods she prepared would be selected for the medicinal qualities they possessed. She would eat bowls of anemic leafy greens and raw garlic smeared on toast. The pint glasses stolen from the bar would get crammed with halved lemons and cayenne pepper. Stitch would think she was getting sick for about a week and then she would be ready to drink Budweiser, to score something powdered for her nose, to convince Michelle to let her cut a design into the skin of her arm with an X-Acto knife because they were very drunk and slightly bored and grooving on being best friends. Stitch loved carving on people when she was drunk. Michelle had a little star, an asterisk keloided on her upper shoulder from such a night. One of Stitch’s ex-girlfriends, Little Becky, had what looked like the words ZOO KEG etched into her stomach, right where her sports bra ended. It actually read 2:00 KEG and was meant to be instructions for Little Becky to either return a tapped keg to the liquor store by 2:00 or a reminder for Little Becky to come to a keg party at 2:00. No one could remember. Michelle had liked Little Becky. She had an odd manner, bashfully respectful, her hands clasped behind her back, her eyes cast low. Her shaggy-dog hairdo tumbled onto her face. She was gentle. She cried very easily. But something about Stitch and Becky’s relationship turned Becky into a monster. She flung Stitch’s leather dildo harness out the air shaft, where it landed in an ancient pile of garbage, irretrievable. She stabbed a steak knife into Stitch’s bedroom walls then burst into tears. Michelle was glad when they broke up. Her room was right beside Stitch’s, she never could be sure if the rough sounds coming from her neighbor were sex or something more troubled.

Michelle got out of her crummy futon and fished around on the wooden floor of her bedroom for something to wear to the bagel shop. Every day she ordered a salt bagel with dill cucumber cream cheese, prompting one bagel worker, also a student at the Chinese medicine school, to wonder what caused her to wake each day with such a thirst for salt. Michelle just shrugged and waited for the girl to pour her giant cup of coffee and drop her bagel on the toaster’s glowing conveyor belt.

Michelle lived three blocks from the bagel shop. Every morning she thought of the walk with dread, it brought her through the crossroads of Sixteenth and Mission. Crackheads, skinny and grimy and as indistinguishable as pigeons, trolled the corner, fighting with one another, spare changing or nodding off, baking where the bricks sloped up around the BART hole. That afternoon Michelle paid them special mind. At one time they were like her, they had had this day: the day after they first smoked crack. Surely none of them thought it would land them there, drooling in public, their mouths askew, shit on their pants, looking like zombies, their eyes bugged and their minds emptied. No one did drugs thinking they’d become a drug addict. Everyone was looking for fun and sure of their control, just like Michelle right then, moving past that curbside death row, heading toward Valencia where the crackheads fell away and were replaced by boutiques and bagelries. Michelle touched her cheeks, already hot from the terrible sun. She needed to buy sunscreen or one of those special global-warming visors that came down over your face and made you look like an asshole. The thought of buying anything beyond a bagel exhausted her.

What would Michelle do while her friends recovered from their drug binge? She would sit at the bagelry and try to write another book. The heartbreak of having written and published a first book is that the world then expected you to write a second. She would sit in cafés and scribble in her notebook and feel superior to the cleaner people with laptops flipped open on their nearby tables. She would write, and later she would read her efforts aloud in the remaining neighborhood bars. She would report to her job at the bookstore this week in slightly better condition for not having spent her evenings in bar bathrooms with Ziggy and Stitch. When her friends were repaired they would call for her, and she would come.

3

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.

4

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.

Weird, Ziggy said. They sat in the risers of a dance studio and watched as teen after teen approached the microphone and delivered their wordy anthems and manifestos. Clear patterns emerged. Anger was channeled into rage against injustice. People were mad: at racism, at the cops, at teachers and parents, at the prison industrial complex and the criminalization of poverty. These kids hadn’t had a glass of water in months. Their families couldn’t afford meat. They were raised on ABC books featuring kangaroos and zebras, donkeys and gorillas, only to come of age and find them all gone the way of the dinosaur. The earth was totally busted and the youth were pissed.

Other poems got cosmic. Kids tranced out, imagining themselves the progeny of planets, of outer space, of mother earth. Within them the spirit of the banana tree, Douglas fir, wild avocado, and rainbow chard lived on. They proclaimed their ancestral lineage. Michelle heard shout-outs to Yemayá and Quetzalcoatl, to Thor and Nefertiti. The boys’ hands reached out and rubbed the air in front of them as if they were scratching records. The girls tilted their heads to the ceiling and their tones took on a faraway wistfulness, like a bunch of little Stevie Nickses.

Michelle was bored. The two of them had considered smuggling alcohol into the event—just for the transgressive thrill, just to be outrageous, not because they were alcoholics. That they had decided against it was proof they were, in fact, not alcoholics. Their hard drinking was a sort of lifestyle performance, like the artist who wore only red for a year, then only blue, then yellow. They were playing the parts of hardened females, embodying a sort of Hunter S. Thompson persona, a deeply feminist stance for a couple of girls to take. They were too self-aware to be alcoholics. Real alcoholics didn’t know they could even be alcoholics, they just drank and drank and ruined their lives and didn’t have any fun and were men. Michelle and Ziggy were not losers in this style, and so they were not alcoholics. They were living exciting, crazy, queer lives full of poetry and camaraderie and heart-seizing crushes. I mean, not that night, but generally. That night they were bored. All the teen poets sounded the same, it was sort of depressing.

They’re teenagers for god’s sake! Ziggy scolded Michelle when she complained. What were you doing when you were that age? Michelle remembered having an affair with the bisexual witch who played Frank-N-Furter at The Rocky Horror Picture Show in Cambridge. She had given him a blow job in the trunk of her best friend’s Hyundai. He hadn’t enjoyed it, he didn’t like oral sex. He thought Michelle was sort of trashy for having gone there. Michelle had only been trying to do something nice for the witch, who she thought was so cute with his long, bleached hair, and such a good Frank-N-Furter with his arched, anorexic eyebrows. She relayed the story to Ziggy.

See? Ziggy said. You were sucking dick. These kids are making art. Teenage Ziggy had been a frustrated poet with an early drug habit, scrawling fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck in her journal, for pages and pages. She still had the books, had shown them to Michelle. They were very cool to look at, having the scrawled deliberation of a Raymond Pettibon mixed with the druggie splatter of a Ralph Steadman.

The teen poets before them were so wholesome and focused and directed, so young, with such a grasp on language and the confidence to perform in front of a crowd of strangers—they were miracles, all of them. If they managed to grow up, they would go to writing programs and summer at writers’ colonies and have their fiction published in highbrow magazines, they were starting so early. It was much too late for Michelle and Ziggy. They were twenty-seven already, in no time at all they’d be thirty, terrifying. No one knew what would happen then. Michelle couldn’t imagine anything more than writing zine-ish memoirs and working in bookstores. Many of her coworkers were gray-haired and elderly so she figured she really could work there for the rest of her life, engaged in the challenge of living on nine dollars an hour. Michelle thought the only thing that would change as she entered her thirties was maybe she’d want to join a gym, but it was hard to say.

Ziggy figured she’d be dead.

On the stage an adorable boy with a wild Afro that weighed more than he did spoke a jumble of new-age nonsense into the mic.

Is He Stoned? Michelle asked Ziggy. He’s Not Making Any Sense.

Michelle did not enjoy pot, and often didn’t recognize the signs of someone being under its influence. This kid sounded like a cat had pawed across his keyboard and he was reading the results as a poem.

It’s like jazz, Ziggy explained. It’s like he’s scatting. You know? Bee diddy be bop, biddy bop, Ziggy proceeded to scat. Someone behind them hissed a shush at them. Probably the boy’s parents. On stage the poet began to beatbox, confirming Ziggy’s analysis and energizing the crowd, even Michelle. He sounded like a machine! Like a robot! How was he doing it! It was amazing! The audience began to clap along. It was impossible not to be carried away on this wave of excitement. Michelle, who loathed audience participation with a panic that approached pathology, timidly smacked her palms. Ziggy was hollering and throwing her hands in the air, making the Oo-OOOOO noise that was like a hip-hop birding call. Others responded in kind from around the studio. The boy made a sound like a needle being pulled from a record and was done. He smiled at the audience and shuffled meekly from the stage, his cloud of hair bouncing above him.

Michelle figured they were pretty much done, and then the last poet took the stage: Lucretia. Her hair was the color of faded jeans, and choppy. Everything about her was choppy—the sleeves had been sawed from her oversized T-shirt, her pants had been cropped just below the knee, high-tops puffed out around her ankles. Her face as she moved into the light was so stony it took Michelle a moment to register her as female, a recognition that immediately bled into an understanding of the teen as queer. A queer teen! Michelle turned and clutched at Ziggy wordlessly. A queer teen! Michelle and Ziggy loved queer teens. All queers loved queer teens. Queer teens triggered so much in a grown homosexual. All the trauma of their gay youths bubbled up inside them and the earnest do-gooder gene possessed by every gay went into overdrive. They wanted to save the queer teens, make sure they weren’t getting beat up at school or tossed from their homes to sleep in parks.

Nearly all the queers Michelle knew were fuckups in one way or another. Being cast out of society early on made you see civilization for the farce it was, a theater of cruelty you were free to drop out of. Instead of playing along you became a fuckup. It was a political statement and a survival skill. Everyone around Michelle drank too much, did drugs, worked harder at pulling scams than they would ever work at finding a job. Those who did have jobs underearned, quit, or got fired regularly. They vandalized and picked fights. They scratched their keys across the sides of fine automobiles, zesting the paint from the doors. Because everyone around Michelle lived like this it felt quite natural. One girl was doing an art project in which she documented herself urinating on every SUV she encountered. Everyone had bad credit or no credit, which was the worst credit. What they excelled at was feeling—bonding, falling into crazy love, a love that had to be bigger than the awful reality of everything else. A love bigger than failure, bigger than life. They clumped together in friendship with the loyalty of Italian mafiosi.

I Would Fucking Die For You, Michelle liked to tell Ziggy when they were wasted and sitting together on a curb, smoking.

I would fucking die for you too, Ziggy concurred. I would take a bullet for you. She dragged on her cigarette so powerfully the whole thing was gone in one pull. What about Stitch, would you die for her?

I Would. I Would Die For Stitch.

I would too, Ziggy nodded, without hesitation. Surely no one would ever be asked to take a bullet for another, but this was not the point. The world beyond them felt hostile, taking bullets was an emotional truth, it felt real.

On the stage the young queer seemed to know she was killing it. Michelle’s heart tore open and wept blood at the humanity of this girl’s experience. To be a butch girl in high school, to be better at masculinity than all the men around you, and to be punished for it! How everyone acts like you’re a freak when really you are the hottest most amazing gorgeous together deep creative creature the school has ever housed and you know it, somehow you know it, and everyone knows it, and no one can deal with it—oh, the head fuck of that situation, sitting on the shoulders of a teenager! Michelle’s hand was splayed on her chest like she was having a heart attack. Ziggy noticed.

Oh no, she said.

Michelle’s eyes were like a slot machine that had come up cherries. The youth looked so bitter and fierce at the smacking, stomping close of the poem, her eyes too old to be stuck in the smooth face of a teenager. She looked like she had been sustaining the ongoing tragedy of life for longer than eighteen years. Michelle’s heart had fully liquefied, was puddled somewhere else in her body.

The poet’s cheekbones were high and her tired eyes had an exotic lilt. Her dusky-blue hair, cut into no discernable style, was thick, itching to spring into curls. And her poem was good enough to win the competition.

Are We Just Picking Her Because She’s Queer? Michelle worried into Ziggy’s ear.

Ziggy shook her head. Her orange hair, separated by grease and product into individual clumps, swung like fringe. No, she’s really, really good, Ziggy said reverentially.

Better Than The Beatboxer? Michelle checked.

Better than the Beatboxer.

Beatboxing Isn’t Poetry Anyway, Michelle pointed out.

On the stage the girl accepted her trophy and did a friendly hug slash chest thump with the Beatboxer, who had come in second. Everyone who placed was masculine, had delivered poems laced with rage and anger. None of the girls, none of the little Stevie Nickses with their yearning poems of love and self-exploration, had placed. Michelle felt the sting of injustice as she observed this, then, upon remembering she was a judge, the prick of shame. She was part of the problem! Given a bit of power Michelle was no better than anyone else. Did she hate women, too? It was true she found much of the girl poetry limp and whiny, frustratingly vague. They hadn’t zeroed in on a social ill and gone to battle, they had turned their vision inward and taken the audience on a murky journey. Michelle guessed they’d all write devastating memoirs in about five years. She decided not to worry about it and went to congratulate the winner.

Mary Kay Letourneau! Ziggy shrieked, clipping her in the shoulder with their shared 40 ounce of Olde English.

What? Michelle cried. She’s Eighteen! That’s Legal!

Mary Kay Letourneau, Ziggy repeated, shaking her head. They moved together through the darkness of South Van Ness, passing Victorians protected from the street by wild invasive shrubbery and tall iron fences. The overhang of dying trees blotted the streetlights and the sidewalk was empty of people. In San Francisco’s nicer neighborhoods people with money had converted their yardscapes to pebble and driftwood, stuck here and there with spiny succulents. In the Mission nobody could afford to uproot the giants and so they eventually would tumble, crashing through a fence and onto the street, hopefully not killing anyone, blocking the sidewalk until the city came and dragged it away.

In the coming blocks hookers would suddenly materialize, women in big shoes and cheap little outfits. Sometimes Michelle would be walking alone in a similar outfit and the women would regard her skeptically, wondering if she was working their block. Men in cars would slow their roll, also inquisitive. Michelle offered smiles of solidarity to the women and flipped off the men, masking her fear with snobbish indignation, praying for them to drive away. Once, drunk, she removed a high heel and walked toward the curb as threateningly as one can with such a gait, one pump on, one pump held menacingly above her head. The would-be predator drove away. Mostly the men were simply looking to purchase sex, not terrorize anyone. Michelle understood that to truly support a prostitute meant wishing her a successful business, which translated to streets teeming with inebriated men propositioning anyone who looked slutty from their car windows. She tried to have a good attitude about it.

Michelle wrenched the 40 from her friend’s grip. She hated sharing anything with Ziggy, who bogarted the booze and whose strangely wet lips soaked cigarette filters. Once Michelle hit her Camel Light only to have Ziggy’s saliva ooze from the spongy tip. Ziggy would not take a languid, gentle inhalation but a stressed-out trucker pull, one and then another, making the cigarette hot, the tip a burning cone. Michelle did not know what to do with such a cigarette. She would rather buy Ziggy a carton of Camels than share a smoke with her, but she was stuck. Ziggy was her best friend and everyone was broke.

Ziggy was both scandalized and delighted by Michelle’s love-at-first-sight encounter with the teenager. Her walk when newly drunk became a sort of dance, she swiveled out from her hips as she slid down the street. Like many butches, Ziggy dealt with her feminine hips by weighing them down with a lot of junk. A heavy belt was threaded through the loops of her leather pants. The word RAGGEDY was spelled in metal studs across the back, as if you could not simply see for yourself. All the dykes had recently discovered the shop in the Castro where leather daddies got their belts, vests, caps, and chaps. A bearded fag resembling the Greek god Hephaestus would pound the word of your choice into the leather with bits of metal. It was expensive, but worth it if you had it. Ziggy went from rags to riches regularly, scoring jobs at yuppie restaurants and then slipping on a wet floor and throwing her back out. She blew her cash on leather goods and rounds of tequila for everyone, plus some cocaine and maybe a nice dinner in a five-star restaurant where service people treated her like a pig. Whatever was left over was given away to people on the street, and then it was back to bumming cigarettes off her friends.

But Ziggy’s hips: a Leatherman was snapped to the belt, like a Swiss Army knife but more so. The gadget flipped open into a pair of pliers with a world of miniature tools fanning out from the handles. Screwdriver, corkscrew, scissors, tweezers. The Leatherman was a lesbian phenomenon and life ran more smoothly because of it. Ziggy had that on one hip and a Buck knife in a worn leather sheath on the other. A hankie forever tufted from her back pocket, corresponding to the infamous faggot hankie code. The hue, pattern, or even material flagging from Ziggy’s ass transmitted the desire for a particular sexual activity, right or left pocket communicated whether the butch would prefer the giving or receiving end. Ziggy’s tastes were varied and shifting and hankies of many sort danced between her pockets. That night a flash of lamé dangled from her right cheek, signaling her wish to be fucked by a fancy femme.

In Ziggy’s other pocket sat a leather wallet, hooked to her belt loop with a swag of silver chain. The nights Ziggy packed, yet another layer of leather and metal would be rigged across her hips, a heavy dildo curled in her underwear. The overall affect of these accessories was not unlike a woman dancing the hula in a skirt of shells and coconuts, or belly dancers draping their bellies in chain mail. The swinging, glinting hardware propelled Ziggy forward from her core, and, though your eyes were drawn to the spectacle, the flash obscured the femininity—like dazzle camouflage. A lot of butches wore this look, but Ziggy did it best.

Gay Men Fuck Younger Boys All The Time, Michelle said fiercely.

Okay, NAMBLA, Ziggy snorted.