Black Wave (17 page)

8

Michelle's morning hangover and subsequent posthangover plan that afternoon was no different than any other hungover day in Los Angeles. She woke up on the futon, her head stuck to the pillow with sleep, her body dampened with a mild sweat, cooked with heat, the sunlight like lasers shooting through the venetian slats, burning her skin in stripes. She was underslept. Her body had metabolized the wine to sugar and she'd woken high from it, bouncy, her heart racing, dehydrated. Michelle woke up craving pineapple juice, rounded triangles of watermelon, long salted slices of cucumbers. She thought of San Francisco, of its dampness and mold, right then she did not miss it. She enjoyed the “tan” she was getting just snoozing, naked, in her bed at home. Sleepily she drifted away from herself, gazed down at her somewhat tragic life and found it looked good, like a Tennessee Williams play. Hangovers made Michelle tender, made her nostalgic—not for her past but for the life she was living right now, the moment passing through her fingers. She was not
deep enough inside it, she had to live harder somehow, write it out, or maybe she just really needed to get laid. She should make Joey take her to a gay bar, or maybe start flirting with some customers at the bookstore. In that sleepy, sentimental moment Michelle pledged to lay off the alcohol for a while. At work she would seek out poetry books to augment her contemplative mood. She would read philosophy and self-help. She would cut down on her drinking, maybe take a break for a month. She would feel on the verge of changing her life.

By the end of her shift Michelle would feel normal—stronger, caffeinated, fortified. She'd think about how gloomy she'd been all day, how dramatic. She would laugh at herself, quietly, inside her head—how silly, how histrionic! She would stop at the Mayfair Market on the way home and purchase a bottle of wine. Why was she so extreme all the time? Get too drunk and it's all, Oh, I have to stop drinking! Why so hysterical? She would have a glass of wine with dinner—civilized, European. She would fill tortillas with honey and cheese and let the blue flames of the stovetop singe them. Maybe Michelle would work on her scrapbook afterward, just for like an hour, then go to sleep, No calling the Pink Dot. No need to, she would just be having a glass of wine with dinner.

Michelle lay in bed teetering between her plan for the day (the same aspirational plan as every day) and her understanding of what would actually happen (the same drunken ending as the many nights before). Her hangover beat like a heart inside her head. If Beatrice and the husband came in today her hangover would be painful. If it was just her and Joey she could make her hangover funny, a sophisticated gag. She would tell Joey all about calling the Pink Dot, the
flies dive-bombing the wine, and it would be funny, really funny, funny in a way it couldn't be alone. Joey understood tragicomic lifestyles like only faggots do. Michelle would give him all the details of her nightgown and Joey would die, Joey would love it.

Joey didn't drink anymore, not after almost dying of a heroin overdose while working retail back in New York City. He'd worked at a couture boutique and everyone who worked there was really hot and had a problem with heroin. They would go downstairs to the basement, shoot up, clamber back upstairs to collapse on a couch and stare at the customers. He got fired for dropping his bagel in front of the designer. He'd been nodding out early in his shift, standing in the middle of the boutique, swaying, an egg bagel in his palm. It landed all over the floor.
You're dropping your bagel,
hissed the manager, and sent him home forever. Dropping the bagel was Joey-speak for not maintaining, for losing control, dysfunctioning. Michelle felt proud that she had never dropped the bagel at work, never, not ever.

There was another new employee at the bookstore, an unemployable rocker chick whose parents were friends of Beatrice. Beatrice was doing the parents a favor, paying the rocker chick minimum wage to alphabetize a crate of CDs in the back room. The girl was very twitchy and wore a stormtrooper doll on a cord around her neck. She'd been there for three days and had already passed out and been sent home twice.

She keeps dropping the bagel,
Joey clucked.

Amateur, Michelle said.

One morning the telephone rang and rang. It rang and rang and rang and rang. Who the fuck is calling? Michelle wondered
uselessly, unable to answer the phone. She wasn't ready to be in the world yet. The digital beep trilled, the phone's red light flickered. Maybe Joey had a celebrity sighting at the bookstore. Michelle had had her best celebrity sighting about one week ago, a life-changing experience. So far the celebs at the bookstore had been impressive but minor. Alan Quartermaine from
General Hospital
came in with his boyfriend, oh yes, Michelle was sure, that was his boyfriend, Alan Quartermaine was gay! Michelle couldn't believe she hadn't realized that, all those years watching
General Hospital
in the 1980s! She had much more respect for the actor. He played straight so convincingly.

Many shoppers had faces that nagged at Michelle. That was life in LA. She had seen them in commercials, speaking a single line on a sitcom, the silent villain in every movie ever, but she could not place them. She stared, but they probably liked that. All actors were narcissists. Kyle told her this. Kyle said that many nonnarcissistic actors were completely talented, but it took a narcissist's particular and terrible skill set to make it in the industry. Michelle stared at a customer with unruly black curly hair. She was on the verge of giving up when it came to her: Booger from
Revenge of the Nerds
! She phoned Joey at home to tell him.

That actor was on
Moonlighting
too!
he added.

Oh, Right!

Then Matt Dillon came in. Apparently Matt Dillon came in all the time. He collected old rockabilly records. Beatrice kept a stack for him in the back room. Michelle had become obsessed with Matt Dillon at a young age, after watching him die in a hail of bullets in
Over the Edge
, a great seventies movie about disaffected youth shooting guns, having sex in unfinished suburban tract homes, and lighting their school on fire. The obsession was stoked when he fucked Kristy
McNichol in
Little Darlings
, and went totally haywire when he embodied all Michelle's favorite characters in all her favorite S. E. Hinton books:
The Outsiders, Tex, Rumble Fish.
Michelle was crazed with him in
Drugstore Cowboy
. Any movie where Matt Dillon got shot was an amazing movie. He was the number-one influence on her sexuality, a bigger influence than queerness itself, as everyone Michelle had ever been hot for resembled, in some vague way detectable only to her, Matt Dillon. And now he was in her store. And he wanted to talk to her. He had brought to the counter an ancient rockabilly record and asked her to play it on the turntable in the kiosk.

It looks good, no scratches, I just wanna make sure,
he said in that lackadaisical voice, the voice of Dallas Winston in
The Outsiders
. Michelle's hands were trembling. She got the record on the turntable without smashing it, though the needle was dropped into the groove a bit sloppily. She turned back to the register. Matt Dillon was leaning against the counter listening to the scratchy record, an old man's voice and a shaky guitar. It sounded good, it sounded very old and unknown. Matt Dillon liked it. He smiled.

Let me see your tattoos,
he commanded.

Like all tattooed females, Michelle went through the world dodging the grabby fingers of men. People reached out and stroked Michelle's arms in ways they would never touch another stranger. The bounds of common courtesy and basic privacy were breached daily.
Lemme see your ink,
douchebags would mumble, their hands already wrapped around her forearm.
Nice tat. Nice ink
. Or the grossest,
Nice body art.
It filled Michelle with rage. But this was Matt Dillon.

Michelle extended her arms and the actor seized them.
Matt Dillon's hands were upon her. He manhandled her limbs, twisting them to get better looks at each piece, flattering them with his attentions, studying even the crappiest among them—the faded word
doubt
scripted blurry on her wrist, the poky tattoo a friend had given her with a needle and India ink. He particularly enjoyed the illustration of a young devil child peddling a Big Wheel up her shoulder.

That makes me think of that band, Gaye Bykers on Acid,
Matt Dillon smiled up at her.
You know them?
Michelle nodded, mute. Her personality, thoughts, and charisma had shrunk up inside her body like testicles dropped into cold water. Here was Matt Dillon, fondling her tattoos, making small talk, and she could not respond.
Gaye Bykers on Acid,
he repeated. He swallowed, staring at her, his Adam's apple dancing in his throat.
There's Lesbian Dopeheads on Mopeds too, you heard of them?
Michelle nodded. She had heard of them.

Michelle had the word
Lezzie
tattooed on her shoulder, right above the devil child he'd been admiring. Michelle wanted to disclaim the Lezzie tattoo to Matt Dillon. Or maybe she should flaunt it. You never knew with a guy. It didn't matter anyway, Michelle was so unable to converse with Matt Dillon that he eventually dropped her arms and returned to the record bins in search of more obscure rockabilly, leaving Michelle alone at the kiosk to sink into a shame spiral about her clothes. She was wearing a pair of cutoff camouflaged pants for god's sake, like a man, like a butch. Her T-shirt—armless, thank god—had the Nike swoosh with the directive RIOT above it. She had gotten it at an anarchist book fair. It was impressively punk, expressed an admirable impulse, but was it sexy? No. It was enormous on Michelle. She wore combat boots on her feet, boots she hadidly
scrawled stars over with a paint pen one night, bored and drunk in Stitch's room. Her hair was crunchy and blue. She had given herself bangs during a recent bout of PMS. The only time Michelle felt deep regret at not having a lover with her in her studio apartment was when she gave herself this haircut. A lover would have stopped her. The bangs of course looked awful. Michelle could look forward to the hair poking her in the eyeballs until she gave in and pinned them back like a small dog humiliated with hair accessories.

Michelle was powerfully hungover, as she was every morning, and she had picked her outfit blindly. She wore no makeup. What was she thinking? She lived in Hollywood. The most beautiful people in the entire world lived in Hollywood. People whose good looks commanded millions of dollars, people who then used those millions to become more beautiful still. Michelle had learned a valuable lesson: do not leave the house unless you look ready to meet Matt Dillon.

If she had looked cuter perhaps she would have had the confidence to speak to him. From then on, each morning Michelle would look into the broken full-length mirror, found curbside in the Mission and lugged to Los Angeles. She would stare into its glass and ask herself: Am I ready to meet Matt Dillon? She would take the time to ring her eyes in kohl or stick a pair of earrings through the holes in her lobes, but it hardly mattered. She figured Matt Dillon would never return during one of her shifts. These sorts of things rarely happened twice.

Michelle stumbled from bed and answered the telephone. The curved gray screen of her little television mirrored the
gray of the apartment, warped it like a fish-eye security mirror in a convenience store. Michelle caught her reflection. The bloat of her tiny booze-belly pooched out, her face was drawn and haggard, needed watering. She had untangled the dreadlocks that stubbornly overtook her head, and now her hair frizzed out around her skull, damaged and staticky. She did not look ready to meet Matt Dillon. She looked ready to meet Krusty the Clown. She looked like Sideshow Bob.

I Have To Go Back To Bed, Michelle said. I'm Sick. She was. Her reflection had hurt her stomach. I Feel Awful.

You have to listen to me.
Kyle's voice sounded strung tight, vibrating with controlled anxiety, but Kyle often sounded anxious. Twice in high school Michelle had come home to find an ambulance out front, summoned by her brother who was sure he was having first a stroke, then a heart attack. His face felt numb and his hands tingled. His heart was racing out of control, his thin body shook with its gallop. Once inside the ambulance, his vitals being collected, he calmed. He flirted with the EMTs, charmed himself out of a bill, thank god. Kym was furious.
Do you know what a ride in an ambulance costs? A thousand dollars! Are you going to pay for that?

Fine, I'll just let myself die next time,
Kyle replied.
You have like three minutes to respond to a stroke before the brain starts losing oxygen. I'll be a vegetable. You can pull the plug on me.
He slammed the door to his bedroom.

Is this a gay boy thing?
Kym looked to Michelle.
The drama?

Maybe, Michelle admitted. She thought having been raised by a Scorpio nurse who talked constantly about infection and malaise and also a Libra stricken with an endless illness might also have exacerbated her brother's condition.
The grisly medical books that filled Michelle with a detached fascination gave her brother anxiety attacks. He didn't like hearing about falling rectums or South American parasites that swim up men's penises or junkies accidentally injecting a flesh-eating bacteria into their bodies.

You don't do that, do you?
Kyle had once focused his nerves on his sister.

Inject Flesh-Eating Bacteria Into My Body? Michelle tried to joke herself out of the conversation. Nope.

No, you know, you don't do, um . . .
Kyle ransacked his brain for its scant drug file. Michelle held her breath.
Morphine? You don't do morphine, do you?

Morphine! Her brother was such an innocent. Who did morphine? Civil War amputees?
All the doctors at Ma's work have secret morphine addictions,
Kyle said.
You and your girlfriends don't do that, do you?