Black Wave (15 page)

Michelle had actually not gone to the beach alone, but with Lu. They had driven there together. They had had a car, a terrible source of stress. Something from the seventies, a Continental, bigger than half a city bus. They fought about the car a lot, but Michelle didn't want to think about fights right now. She wanted to think about how they had played in the sand. It was a sweet time, when they had first arrived. Before they had to get jobs, and so jobs weren't a problem and Lu's gender wasn't a problem and money wasn't a problem. They had made the mermaid on the beach. They had done it together, sand on their hands.

Michelle felt sad at all the sweet moments she would not be able to write about. The sweet parts were important, without them Michelle just looked insane. Lu was storm clouds and eggshells but she was also goofy sweetness and tender love. Funny dances with a dog-faced underbite and low, dangling arms. Fingers that were kissing bird beaks. Their own language:
Bummerino, Vinnie Barbarino!
was one stage of disappointment,
Bummerino, Grand Torino!
another. Life with another person was built on such things.

Back in the story, Michelle walked to the bus stop and began the arduous return trip to Hollywood. The ride took Sunset all the way, past the street that turned off into the gay center. She looked over at it with mixed emotions, wondering if she should check it out. She missed her friends back in San Francisco, who had completely forgotten about her. She'd seen people leave town, she knew how it went. No one ever spoke about them again. Life moved too fast.
There was too much in front of your face to concern yourself with what wasn't there anymore.

Michelle wondered how she would find new friends, she wasn't the kind of gay who hung out at a gay center. Michelle supposed she was a postgay. It was an offensive term, how could anyone be postgay when queers were still getting beaten and strung to fences and shot at and raped? But it would be a lie for Michelle to pretend her environment had been hostile. She'd lived in West Coast cities, she was gender normative. She was kind of postgay. And as a postgay in Los Angeles, she figured she would not really have any friends. Fabian was busy like LA people were busy, each day a succession of meetings. Michelle didn't quite understand what Fabian did, it had something to do with the Spanish film industry, like in Spain, but also with Brad Pitt. Kyle was in the clutches of his psychotic boss, working twelve-hour days and then managing the woman's social calendar, keeping up with her Match.com profile and fast-tracking her adoption of a third world baby. Michelle got a membership at a Hollywood Video within walking distance from her apartment and rented so many movies the simpleton behind the counter whistled through her teeth at her.
You watch a lot of movies,
she said, shaking her head.

So? Michelle snapped defensively, then wondered if she should ask if they were hiring. The dull cashier seemed vaguely dykey. But Michelle was too proud.

Back at the computer, Michelle strove to universalize herself. But the more she thought about it, the less universal she became. She had tried to write herself straight, but she was so low-rent. She tried to write herself male, but then
there was her pussy and her PMS, the blood that dribbled out from her on its own erratic schedule, ruining her underwear again and again, never mind that she had been menstruating off and on for fifteen years, it didn't matter, she could not keep up with her tampons. Until the cotton overflowed it did not occur to her to change it. The stain of her femaleness bled through her attempts to write herself male. She struggled.

Page after page she built a straight, male, middle-class Michelle who did not drink and did not do drugs. Oh, wait—could she do that now? As a straight, male, middle-class man could she now shoot literary heroin and go on a literary crack bender? It depended, she suspected, on where straight, male, middle-class Michelle worked and how many dependents depended on him. Michelle realized that this was what they called raising the stakes. Sometimes the fact that she had not gone to college really did seem to have a negative effect on her life. If Michelle had gone to college she was certain she'd have been taught how to write from the perspective of a straight, white, middle-class man. She would have to teach herself how to be universal. She could do it, it would just take time. Meanwhile, she found a job around the corner, at the used book and record store.

Michelle lived in a neighborhood, a rarity in Hollywood. It had a name: the Franklin Strip. It was a strip of Franklin Avenue, just one block long, but that was enough. The block was packed with merchants. A coffee shop called—no, really—the Bourgeois Pig. Michelle was aghast. She knew that Los Angeles embraced wealth in a manner she was unaccustomed to but this was unreal. The Bourgeois Pig? Their coffees were four dollars and Michelle once spied Christina Ricci sitting at an outdoor table. Next to
the Bourgeois Pig was a magazine store that sold a severely edited selection of about five different magazines. It was a very minimalist shop, and the girl working the counter looked bored and superior as she flipped through a copy of
Index
. Michelle envied her employment, she was right to vibe superior. Michelle could think of nothing better than being paid to flip through magazines all day. She thought about asking if the magazine store was hiring but knew instinctively that it was the kind of place where you were invited to work, like a beautiful young girl discovered by a modeling agency at a soda fountain.

There was a small theater run by second-rate soap-opera actors trying to do something serious while clambering out from the daytime TV ghetto. There was a bar and grill where the soap-opera actors would get tanked and pick each other up. Michelle once saw the actor who played Lex Luthor on
Smallville
, looking handsome and gay with his shiny bald head. Michelle thought all men looked gay, it was an effect of having lived in San Francisco so long, where all the men actually were.

Fancy boutiques sold feathered mules and bejeweled purses, guides to foreign lands and candles that smelled like leather. These were lifestyle boutiques, their inventory was random but had a certain logic. If you didn't understand, it wasn't your lifestyle. There was a French restaurant with DJs and fistfights on the weekends, well-dressed men tumbling through the glass doors in a violent clutch.

Then there was the used book and record store, an eyesore on the block. Michelle peered in the window. The interior was nothing but dust and wood and books, books everywhere, more than the shelves could hold, books in tumbled piles, books invading the space reserved for records, heaped
atop stacks of rare opera albums, books blocking the aisles and sliding off wooden carts. The shelves were hand-built with unfinished wood, the apparent creation of hippie gnomes. Inside Michelle could hear hip-hop playing, recognized the obscene lyrics of a Lil' Kim song. A tall, skinny, gay boy, his head wrapped in a red bandana, leaned idly at the register, mouthing the lyrics into the air.

Michelle had a deep feeling of magnetic purpose while peering into the bookstore as if into an aquarium, or perhaps a crystal ball. She turned away from the shop and faced the Scientology Celebrity Centre across the street. It was a Disneyesque compound, all peaks and turrets, lit with soft, glowing lights. The sun had set, the HOLLYWOOD sign was dark, someone had turned out the lights so the city's desperate weren't called to hurl themselves from the letters in the suicidal night. In the daytime the Scientologists blared classical music from their landscaped gardens, loud enough to envelope the Franklin Strip and make it feel like a sort of Main Street USA to the Scientologists' Cinderella Castle.

Michelle turned back to the bookstore. She had a resume stuffed in her army bag and a psychic understanding that if she walked into the bookstore and handed that boy the piece of paper she would be hired immediately. She regarded this uncanny knowledge with dread. Maybe she didn't want a job. The dread was ridiculous, a toddler's tantrum—Michelle could not
not
have a job. She'd been working since she was fourteen, had had to get a special card from City Hall to be signed by her mothers and brought to the grocery store that had hired her. With the exception of one terrifying month when she could not get herself employed and lived off the generosity of Andy, Michelle always worked. But if she got a job in LA it would mean she really lived there.

She regarded the grimy used bookstore. She belonged there. If it were an animal it would be her power animal, if it were a spirit it would be her guide. If Michelle were a bookstore she would be that bookstore. If she waited and brought in the resume tomorrow, or even later that day, the universe wasn't making any promises. But if she walked through the doors right then, employment was guaranteed.

Michelle's psychic impulses were rare and useless. Once she had a precognitive wave that Linda would start brushing her teeth at work, and the very next day the girl shuffled in, hungover with a toothbrush and a fresh tube of toothpaste. I Knew You Were Going To Do That, Michelle said. Otherwise it alerted her to potential romantic threats. Finally her sixth sense was offering her some practical direction. She pushed open the doors and inhaled the cool scent of gently rotting paper.

I don't want dick tonight,
Lil' Kim chanted over the sound system.
Treat my pussy right.
The boy behind the register shook his ass, bony inside his cargo shorts. Michelle passed him her resume and felt herself become hired, energetically. Two days later she had a job.

3

How's LA?
Ziggy asked. Her cell phone crackled, Michelle could hear air whooshing over the receiver.

What Are You Doing? Michelle asked. Are You Riding A Bike? The thought was hilarious. Michelle imagined Ziggy pedaling a ten speed, her hip accoutrements chiming and swinging, a cigarette clamped in her mouth, one hand steering the bike while the other pressed her cell to her head.

I'm driving a car. I got a grant and bought a bitch bucket.

You Got A Grant? Michelle gasped. Who got grants? People who wrote about long-ago trees, about ye olde beavers gnawing down long-ago trees in an extinct autumnal landscape, patting homes together with their flat, muddy tails. People who conjured the lost beauty of the natural world and made the reader feel bad about the state of things in a nostalgic, gentle way—that's who got grants. Not Ziggy. Ziggy screamed her poetry. She had such ADD she couldn't sit still long enough to type them into computers, she committed them to memory or else read them from the
little wrinkled notebooks stuffed in the ass of her pants. Ziggy's poetry was about the horror of men, about racists and fascists. The poems were graphic and mean and made everyone in the audience feel awful, complicit somehow, recalling every time they didn't do the right thing, didn't yell at the man punching the woman in the street, didn't flip off the cops as they harangued a row of Latino teenagers on Mission Street. There were many such instances in a life, and listening to Ziggy, a warrior in her belts of metal, people resolved to have more courage, to fight harder for more freedoms. Ziggy's work was thick with
fucks
and
cunts
and the defamation of the Christian God, and San Francisco had given her a grant.

What's a Bitch Bucket? Michelle asked, jealous.

A Cabriolet. It's a car. A little convertible. A Volkswagen
.

You're Talking To Me Now In A Convertible? On Your Cell Phone?

Yep.
Ziggy's breathing revealed that she was also smoking.

You Should Move Here, You'd Fit In Perfect.

How are you fitting in? Are you partying with celebrities or what?

I Saw Gwen Stefani At A Breakfast Place, Michelle reported. I Used The Bathroom After Her And My Wallet Fell Out Of My Back Pocket And Into The Toilet.

It's like she christened it,
Ziggy said.

For Real. She Hadn't Flushed.

If it's yellow, let it mellow,
Ziggy said.
There's no more water. I donated the van to a water preservation organization. It would be a tax write-off if I did my taxes.

I Saw Marilyn Manson Walking Into A Bookstore With His Girlfriend, Michelle remembered. She Looks Like A Suicide Girl. They Were Holding Hands.

Was he hot?
Ziggy probed.
Did you say hi to him or get his autograph or give him your book or something?

He Was Tall, Michelle said, But I Think He Was Wearing Platform Boots. His Hair Is Really Long. I Only Saw Him From Behind. He Looked Like A Swamp Monster, Just Sort Of Lumbering And Leathery and Dark.

Hot,
Ziggy declared.
He was hot?

I Suppose.

What's your problem?
Ziggy asked.
Remember when we saw him at the Cow Palace? When he came out from the stage crucified on a cross of television sets that burst into flames? And then he came out later like a four-legged beast on those stilts and then he stood up and put his arms in the air and he was like twenty feet tall and the strobe lights were going through him? Remember how good that ecstasy was, you almost didn't take it and then it was so amazing, remember?

I Can't Believe You Got A Grant, Michelle said. I Want To Come Back To San Francisco And Get A Grant. I'm Going To Kick That Olympia Girl Out Of My Room And Come Back.

You can't,
Ziggy said.
You can't come back. Didn't you hear?

Hear What?

About your house? About Clovis? He got hit by a soda truck the morning you moved. Like minutes after you left, I swear. If you had left any later you would have fucking seen it happen. It happened right outside your house. Your old house.

Oh, Michelle said, Oh No. Sweet Clovis, a humble, bent landlord. He had nursed his cancer-stricken wife until death there inside that second-floor apartment, and so he could never leave it. Her spirit could be lingering, Clovis could not risk abandoning it. He sang to it on the karaoke machine. He had pledged not to raise their rent to profit from the housing-mad dot-com millionaires. He had
promised not to sell and he hadn't. He died as broke as anyone, owning a piece of property suddenly worth millions. Michelle cried for how hard his life had been. There was no redemption for Clovis. If there was no redemption for Clovis, why should there be any redemption for anyone? Why, Michelle fumed, did the people demand redemption from their literature? She vowed to make the straight, male version of herself get whacked by a soda truck in the first chapter, after smoking crack with a vanful of lesbians to try to get over his dead wife.

What Will Happen To The House? Michelle asked. That old house was a monument, the city should have bolted a plaque to its doors. Every queer female artist to have a drug problem in San Francisco within the last twenty years had lived in it.

It already happened,
Ziggy said.
New owners, the place looks totally different, they painted it and put these ugly doors on it and a gate on the stoop so no one can sit there. Everyone got money, they all got paid to get evicted. A couple thousand each, I think.

Bile burned in Michelle's belly, giving her an instantaneous ulcer. Seven years she'd suffered there—suffered the roaches, the gangrenous shower, the criminal neighborhood, the fuses that blew every time she plugged in a hair dryer. And when the big payout came she was gone. In Los Angeles. Broke as ever, alone. Michelle thought of Ekundayo getting thousands of dollars, moody Ekundayo who had made her feel like a trespasser in her own home, a bother, an interloper, though she'd lived there a hundred times longer than anyone. Ekundayo who'd spearheaded the effort to paint the living room psych-ward green. Cursed Ekundayo! And that Oly girl! There but a month or two and paid
cash money to evacuate! Only Stitch deserved it, Michelle thought. Stitch who'd lived there nearly as long as she had, caretaking the cockroaches. Why hadn't Stitch called her and told her this had happened? Michelle and Stitch loved Clovis, they'd talked endlessly about having him up for dinner but never got around to cleaning the kitchen.

How's Stitch? Michelle asked. What's Stitch Doing?

Stitch went to Prague,
Ziggy reported.
She's gone.

Prague? Prague? Why Prague? What The Fuck's In Prague?

Beer. Her ancestors. She's Praguian. She's got cousins there.

No Way.

She had a big party about a month ago.

She's Been Gone That Long?

Uh-huh.

The crackle in Ziggy's cell flared and became deafening. Michelle hollered into the receiver, trying to locate her friend, but the call had been dropped. She flung her landline into its base and dropped herself onto the futon. Michelle cried. It was like she had climbed out of a hole and the hole had closed itself behind her. She felt profoundly cut off from herself. That room in that house was the last affordable room in San Francisco. Her studio apartment, a cozy place, grew creepily cozier as the walls closed in on her. She'd left her heart in San Francisco, in that shabby Victorian with the haunted bathroom and the cigarettes ground into the floor, her glittered, moldy bedroom and the beer bottles rolled against the walls. She had only wanted a change of scenery, a strange vacation to clear her head. But without that house to return to, Michelle was trapped in Los Angeles.

She had seen the exiled try to come back. They wore out their welcome sleeping on couches until, truly homeless, they were forced into unfathomable situations, returning home to live with their parents. Michelle checked the digital alarm clock plugged into the wall by the bed. She could cry for twenty minutes and then she was due at the bookstore. She stuffed her face into a pillow and wept, then climbed from her futon and into her new life.