Black Wave (21 page)

Amazingly, Michelle had found a copy of her own book sitting there on the shelf, its orange spine familiar. PLAYLAND, the bold black letters read. Then, LEDUSKI. Michelle pulled it from the shelf. The inside had been signed, inscribed to someone named Betty.
Thanks, Betty!
She read her own familiar, cheerful scrawl.
Great glasses! Enjoy the book!
Michelle was at a loss when signing books. She always wanted to write something profound but wound up bursting with nervousness and etching a slight compliment about the reader's appearance: Great glasses. I like your hair. Cool
boots. She felt shallow and ashamed each time she closed the book and passed it back to the reader. Michelle tried to remember a Betty with glasses. Had she enjoyed the book as Michelle commanded? Perhaps not. Michelle turned the book in her hand, looking at the cover photo, a girl in a plastic miniskirt and combat boots clutching an upturned wine glass by its stem, the wine dribbling out, caught in droplets by the camera. Michelle couldn't remember the girl's name, only that Ziggy had been sleeping with her.
Playland
was about leaving your crazy East Coast family and coming to San Francisco to drink a lot and have sex in queer-bar bathrooms. It was about being young and experimenting with drugs and having lousy jobs. It was about Michelle's life. Finding a copy lodged in the bookstore filled her with complicated feelings. She was proud of herself for being on the shelves, but she was only there because someone had read the book and not cared to keep it. Still, someone, Beatrice or Joey, had thought the cramped, overstuffed bookstore would benefit from the addition of it and they had acquired it. Maybe Betty with the great glasses had been an annoying junkie Joey had tossed a quarter at to get rid of her. Michelle was beginning to understand that a lot of the people peddling used books were, in fact, annoying junkies.

Michelle gave in to the specialness of discovering herself on a bookshelf and trotted up to Beatrice, still engaged in conversation with Neighborhood Judy. I Wrote This, she chirped happily.

Beatrice looked at her with her teary, reddened eyes. Allergies? Michelle wondered. The store was the dustiest place in the world. Motes swirled like a thin snowfall in the light coming through the windows.
Really? Wow.
She gave a little smile, returned to Judy who seemed to be holding her breath until Beatrice's attention returned. Clearly, if the
book had been any good Michelle would not be working in a bookstore.

Michelle could not adjust to the lowly status ascribed to bookstore workers in Los Angeles. In San Francisco, bookstore positions were coveted,
highly
competitive. Michelle had been rejected by bookstores for years, she had to actually publish a book before one would hire her. In San Francisco it was totally cool to work in a bookstore. You would starve to death because they only paid seven dollars an hour, but you would die cool. In Los Angeles you were not cool. You were a stupid counter person making little more than minimum wage in a town where people made millions of dollars a day. There was something seriously wrong with you. You were completely invisible. Michelle retreated to Gay Fiction, so far from the counter she could not hear Judy's rantings, only watch the woman's jerky gesticulations, like a marionette being operated by a fool.

Neighborhood Judy accepted the peace flag from Joey and trotted out the door, flyers advertising that night's vigil fluttering in her wake. Joey kindly stuck one in the window, next to a Nostradamus book he'd slid in when Michelle wasn't looking. Michelle watched Judy bounce purposefully up the strip in her bright white Keds.

She Is So Psyched The World Is Ending, Michelle observed. She Is So Psyched To Have Something Other Than Permit Parking To Get All Worked Up About.

Joey nodded thoughtfully.
A lot of people's lives are going to get a lot more meaningful—fast.

I Don't Know What To Feel About It, Michelle admitted. It Doesn't Feel Real.

Have you seen anybody die yet?

Michelle shook her head. Not Close Up. Just Television. And The Freeway, I Saw Some Crashes. Suicides, Michelle thought, but didn't say it.

You ever see anyone die, ever?

Michelle shook her head.

My boyfriend OD'd when I lived in New York,
Joey said, both of them lingering by the front window.
We did all these things to try to save him. We threw him in the tub, we put ice on him, smacked him, shot him up with salt.

Salt?

Yeah, but none of it worked and he died. I watched him. It was crazy. One minute he was there, he wasn't conscious but he was there, I knew he was there, and then, I could see it, he was gone
.
It fucking freaked me out so much. That it is that easy to leave like, just
—Joey's fingers twitched around in front of his face, as if casting some sort of spell, the spell of a person leaving themselves—
like that,
he said, insistent. He shook out his hands like they'd fallen asleep.
Like that. Whatever keeps us here is hardly anything. We can all go like that, just like that.
Joey looked about to cry. He stretched his eyes extra wide to prevent tears from spilling out. It was the same surprised expression he made to make fun of the women with too much plastic surgery who occasionally browsed the bookstore.

Oh, Joey. Michelle looked at her friend. The tears spilled despite his stricken expression. She put her hand on his bony wrist, but he lifted his hand away to pull the bandanna from his head and daub his eyes. Joey was beginning to go bald and didn't quite know what to do about it, hence the bandanna. Michelle wouldn't have known what to do about it either and felt grateful to never have to deal with such a thing. She supposed some women went nearly bald later in life, but Michelle wouldn't be having a later life.

After Charley died I left. That exact night, I left. He died in the bathtub and I went back to my parents' in Connecticut and I never went back to New York again, I have not been back since. I left him in that house, this girl's house, Heidi, she didn't know where to find me, no one knew where to find me, only Charley would have known, and I left him in the tub, ugh.
He shivered, tied his bandanna back around his head, knotting it tight at the base of his skull.
But it's okay. He would have been okay with it. We both knew what we were doing. He'd left me at the hospital when I had my OD and didn't get in touch with me till they released me, you know? That's how it is with junkies.

Is That When You Stopped Doing It?

Joey shook his head.
No, I did it for longer, sneaking around in my mother's house. Can you imagine? I stopped when I came out here.

Me Too, Michelle said carefully.

You had a habit?
Joey asked.

Michelle blushed, halted. Not Really, she said. Not Like That. We Never Shot. We Just Were Doing It Too Much. Not Enough To Get A Habit. I Don't Think. Michelle couldn't be sure. She always felt like shit in her body, even that day she was so nauseous from bad wine she didn't know how she was going to ingest the apple and cottage cheese she had packed for lunch.

It's so bad.
Joey shook his head.
So bad, so bad, so bad. But sooooo good.
He looked out the window, like there was a giant boulder of heroin sitting on the sidewalk waiting for him to come and chip a chunk of it.
I'm going to spend that last day so high,
he said.
I can't fucking wait.
He stood up and ruffled Michelle's hair, his hand briefly catching on the total snarl of it.
You're in shock, babe.

I Am?

Totally. What are you going to do on the day it's all over.

Michelle drew a blank. She shrugged. I Don't Know.

Shock,
Joey confirmed.
You don't really believe it's happening.

Totally, Michelle affirmed. But if she knew she was in shock, was she still in shock? Was it like being crazy, how if you knew you were crazy you were somehow less crazy? I Don't Know How To Believe It.

It will sink in,
Joey promised.
Once people start dying you'll get it. Once you start seeing dead people. My upstairs neighbor jumped off the roof yesterday. It took her fifteen fucking hours to die. She just lay there in the back lot sort of wailing, like an animal. She's wailing and my fucking housemates are fighting about flags. Your shock will wear off.

Michelle could feel a pull in the thinnest, gauziest layer of her denial, like a run in a pair of panty hose. Michelle stayed still for it, then shook it away. There was a vast, flat coldness underneath her denial. I Don't Want The Shock To Wear Off, she told Joey.

Maybe it won't.
He shrugged.
Maybe it's up to you.
He pushed through the door with a jangle, leaving Michelle alone in the dust and light and walls of books.

Every day the same sequence of events occurred within Michelle. She woke up hungover, totally sick inside her body. An alcohol hangover was normal, had been normal for years and years, but something had changed recently and the alcohol hangovers had become more brutal. Michelle trudged through intense nausea on her walk to work, the rise and fall of potential vomit mimicking the motion of her legs as she plodded sturdily onward. She never puked, but she always wondered if perhaps she should.

Arriving at the bookstore she opened the door with her key and did what she was paid to do. She flicked on all the lights. She turned on the cash register. She positioned herself behind the wheeled wooden cart holding the ten-cent paperbacks, the books bought against your better judgment when you could no longer endure the performance of a haggling junkie. You bought the thing for a quarter then sold it out front for a dime. Michelle wondered how the store even stayed in business with such practices, she presumed the trade of first-edition Norman Mailers on the Internet was what paid her paltry paycheck.

The dime cart was terribly heavy, especially with Michelle so weakened from drinking. It would take her forever to push it out the door, books tumbling to the sidewalk—the sun, insistent and deadly, the torturing dictator of a third world country, shining on her, turning her cells against her with its radiation. Michelle would feel faint by the end of it. She would retreat into the kiosk and stick her head between her knees, her entire body whirling beyond her control, dizziness and nausea and intense dehydration, the dew of her sweat coating her skin clammily while her throat, so dry, caught on itself like Velcro, choking her. Weak from not eating, her nerves jagged with coffee, her eyes blurred, dulled from the brightness outside, tearing from allergies or something, who knows, who knows what was wrong with Michelle. Maybe she was dying. Everyone had cancer. Michelle had had little spots removed from her body years ago, a recipient of the free health care San Francisco gave to the poor. A doctor at the charity clinic had frozen the moles scattered across her skin and sliced them off with a sharp little tool. Michelle felt like a dumpstered vegetable, good enough if you just cut the rot away. She thought of Stitch,
how Stitch should get it together and go to medical school, get paid for cutting people with sharp little razors. Mornings in the bookstore, her body gone psychedelic with sickness, Michelle wished someone would come and cut away the problem within her, whatever it was.

Sometimes she knew it was the alcohol. In the morning a thought competed with the distracting illness of Michelle's body and the blare of the alarm clock—Stop drinking. The thought throbbed at her temples as she plodded through the studio. Stop drinking stop drinking stop drinking. The chant bubbled up to her consciousness. Hmmmmmm, maybe she should stop drinking? It was an extreme thought, it gripped Michelle. It seemed sort of fun, like accepting a dare, like the clean slate of potential, a new school year begun, and Michelle, tricked out with a new pencil case clattering with Number 2s, is inspired to be the best student ever, ready to understand mathematics for the first time in her life.

That was one way to approach the thought Stop drinking stop drinking stop drinking. But if Michelle stopped drinking, what would she do? That's what Michelle did, she drank. She wrote, too—not so much right now but that was okay, that's what happened to writers, you had periods where you were just living. Michelle preferred to see her whole life as art, she liked to think that she was always a writer, always writing, even when she wasn't, even when she was just trying to get out the door in the morning without puking. Stop drinking stop drinking stop drinking. Okay, fine, Michelle placated the voice. She would not drink tonight, whatever night that was. She would not stop at the market on the way home. The Mayfair Market. Joey called it the Unfair Market. Then he started calling it the Unfair to Gays Market, even though
they weren't, it was just funny.
Want anything from Unfair to Gays?
Michelle liked the succotash, corn and beans, light and fresh, that was usually something she could eat without getting sick. Cold food was more soothing than warm food. Warm food was like vomit. Once Michelle had seen Jon Cryer shopping in the dairy aisle at Unfair to Gays. Duckie from
Pretty in Pink
! Michelle had stared openly at the man as he moved past the yogurt and butter with a woman and a child, his family. Duckie! Hollywood was so magical.

By the time Michelle's shift at work ended she would inevitably feel better. She would feel better and she would be embarrassed at how dramatic she had felt earlier, with the stop drinking stop drinking stop drinking. Why was she so extreme all the time, Jesus. So hysterical. A little hangover and it's, Oh, don't ever drink again. A glass of wine sounded amazing, why would she deprive herself of a glass of wine after a day of work, people in Europe drank wine all day, their children drank wine, Michelle was screwed up from being an American, Americans didn't know how to do anything properly, Michelle would have a European glass of wine and everything would be fine. Tonight she would not stay up all night, finishing the bottle, calling in another from the Pink Dot, no way would she do that. She would not be sick again in the morning, she would stroll into work strong and healthy, her heart in better shape, actually, from the antioxidant benefits culled from a glass of natural wine, from grapes, fruit, something that still managed to grow in the toxic soil of their planet, Michelle saluted the grape and its hardy, twirling vines. Nothing seemed as alcoholic as quitting drinking. That was one thing that alcoholics did for sure.