Black Wave (6 page)

6

In the afternoon Andy came to Michelle's house. Michelle would not let her inside because Lucretia was up there, in her bed. She stood with Andy outside on Fourteenth Street. She was barefoot on the disgusting ground, in a thrifted Garfield nightshirt that read AQUARIUS.
Why are you in your pajamas?
Andy asked skeptically.
It's like three o'clock.

It's Healthier, Sleeping In The Day, Michelle bluffed. Then: I Was Up Late.

Up late snorting watery heroin with Lu, but she omitted that part. After the bar had closed, despairing that she had not thought ahead and run to the liquor store for after-hours alcohol, Michelle had whined, and Lucretia had suggested copping a bag off one of the gentlemen entrepreneurs who offered
Coca, Chiva, Outfits
as you passed them on the corner of Sixteenth and Mission. Michelle had never done heroin before—it seemed the time to try such an obvious and stupid drug had passed. On the other hand, it had never been offered to Michelle and so she'd never
had the opportunity, and she was drunk and the night was so bright with the street lights and the shop lights and the cars shooting beams from their eyes and the cocaine was electric inside her and Lu's kiss had unhinged her and she had already broken Andy's heart again—if now wasn't the time to try heroin, then when?

Michelle made the youngster make the purchase while she waited across the street, leaning against the wrought-iron fence that kept a trailer park school protected from the daily chaos of that intersection. How terrible to go to school in a ring of trailers on the corner of Sixteenth and Mission, where homeless crackheads breeched the fence to sleep and piss and puke and screw on the patch of dead grass and trash ringing the schoolyard. Michelle wondered if it was a school for children who'd killed their parents, she hoped these kids had done something terrible enough to deserve such a bleak learning environment.

Lucretia returned with the drugs. Thanks, Michelle said, Thanks For Understanding. Michelle could not accompany the teen to buy the narcotics because she could not be seen doing such a thing. She couldn't get arrested, she was an adult.

Yeah, I'm an adult too, I'm eighteen,
Lucretia said.

Yeah, But That's Hardly An Adult, They'd Let You Off, Michelle said.

The youth laughed.
What are you talking about? I have two friends in jail for drugs.

Hmmph, Michelle said. She just didn't think a teen slam poet would be arrested. Someone would come to her aid, right? Besides, there was the matter of Michelle's reputation. She was a writer. Not many people had read her book, but all those who lived in her neighborhood had. She was
given a kindly regard. Yes, she was a little messy but she couldn't be too far gone if she made it to her shift each day at the bookstore, if she'd managed to write an actual book while still in her twenties, if she managed to pen an article here and there for the local weekly. Why, that was more than some people did in their whole lifetime! Also, Michelle could not buy heroin on Mission Street, for then these drug dealers who harassed her daily would never stop, they would think they knew her, and Michelle would be mortified. The whole thing was too trashy even for her. Her attitude toward heroin was like her attitude toward hot dogs: she didn't want to see where they came from, she just wanted to eat them in the privacy of her own home while sick with PMS. And so Lu returned with the drugs, and the pair retired to Michelle's bedroom where the sticky brown nugget was dissolved in a tablespoon of water, the impurities burned away, and then sucked down the back of their throats with the tubes of hacked and gutted pens.

Unlike the barfelonius crack, Michelle liked the heroin. It made her feel princessy and submissive. It was like liquefied sex splashing down the back of her throat. Not any sort of sex, but a creepy kind Michelle liked to imagine alone at night, fantasies of kidnap and poison and molestation. The drug sluiced into that place inside her. A tuning fork was struck inside her psyche. She laid her head, swarming and sick, on Lucretia's lap, dreaming that she was a runaway thirteen-year-old and that Lu—deftly fixing her own hit with one hand while keeping the other warmly on Michelle's head—was the creep who picked her up at a bus station. It was all darkness, the drugs and the dreams they loosened, but Michelle was enchanted, suspended in a dark water. Lucretia, a teenager, a stranger, her hand on
Michelle's head, felt like a message from God. This is love. The drugs swamped her. This is love. God, all Michelle ever wanted was love, and it had been so close all along, right at Sixteenth and Mission, tucked into the grimy pockets of the Coca, Chiva, Outfits man.

In the sex they had—lazy and hard, slow-motion, invasive—Michelle found new possibilities inside her body, gasping into the teen's mouth, the drug removing all resistance to anything, everything. This is love. They did it for a while, seeing how close they could come to breaking Michelle, and then they fell into a slumberless sleep of floating images and waking hallucinations. At some point Michelle began to cry. This was not unusual—Michelle cried all the time, she had some kind of crying problem, she always had, her moms had called her Waterworks as a child. They'd had to, to not laugh about her sadness would have meant they'd have to take it seriously and to take seriously a little girl who cried all the time was too disturbing. What was Michelle feeling when she cried beside the teen, who was locked in her own dreamtime? She had opened herself so wide and now she was alone. She had felt swells of love but understood, as time spiraled around her, that it was not love. She was a chemical disaster. And what about Andy? Andy would really hate her now and Michelle would never find another girl like Andy ever again, someone who would
not
do heroin with her, someone who fed her pancakes and pork chops. Michelle could see the sun rising above the overpass outside her window and she was certain, finally, that her life was out of control. She cried.

On the sidewalk in her Garfield nightie Michelle crouched
beside a parking meter and threw up.
What is wrong with you?
Andy demanded with disgust and alarm. She noted the puff of Michelle's eyelids. It's what happened when she cried, like she was allergic to her own tears. Her face would swell up red and bulbous, she looked like a whole other girl. Michelle was terribly vain about it. She hated being ugly and she hated being weak. She hated the proof of her emotional instability sitting on her face. The swelling took forever to go down, she applied various remedies to the salted wound of her face. She kept tablespoons in the freezer, would place their rounded bottoms on her eyelids, but the cold only made them tear. She kept chamomile tea bags soaking in the fridge. She kept cucumbers handy and would layer her face in slices. At a beauty store she selected a product with raspberry extract that promised to reduce eye puffiness. Michelle was shocked at how many beauty products were marketed as balm for swollen eyes. She imagined thousands of female consumers sobbing hysterically all night and acting like there was totally no problem by day, smearing creams into their haggard faces at the bathroom mirror. She was part of a demographic.

From a drugstore once she purchased a tube of Preparation H. She had read in a fashion magazine that it was the secret weapon of models who stayed up all night partying in Ibiza, snorting premium cocaine and then arriving at 5:00 a.m. to be photographed on a beach in a sequined bikini, their lives expertly managed. Not having nervous breakdowns. Michelle smeared the Preparation H over her ballooned eyelids. The stink of fish was immediate and intense. So was the slick of the stuff, the grease clotting her fingers and her eyelids. Her tears, still so close to the surface, came again. There was fish oil in Preparation H!
Indeed, it seemed to be little more than fish oil. Michelle scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed the first few layers of skin from her face. The oil clung to her like lard to a frying pan. Were there different sorts of Preparation H, some with fish oil for hemorrhoids, some without for the beautiful faces of hungover supermodels? The stink of dead ocean stayed trapped in her nose all day. She raccoon-ringed her eyes in smudgy eye shadow and hoped for the best.

Andy didn't think Michelle seemed happy with her life choices. She was puffy and somnambulistic. Andy hadn't fed her in three days. Bony to start, a few meals skipped had swift and visible consequences for Michelle. She seemed to have gone around a certain bend.

Are you on drugs?
Andy demanded of Michelle as they stood above the splat of fresh vomit.

What Are You Talking About? Michelle asked.

Do you think it's all the cocaine, maybe you are doing too much and that's why things are crazy again?

Michelle summoned her speech, the one about the Beat poets and their awful, reckless behavior—their outlaw heroics, their hedonistic freedom: Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg. Michelle would thus begin her speech, then shift focus to Hunter S. Thompson, on pills and LSD, firing guns on a Western ranch, totally boozed up. If the situation was bad enough to invoke Bukowski, well, then she would. She totally would. Did anyone think this canon of druggie men were out of control? Only in the most admirable of ways! Out of control like a shaman or a space explorer, like a magician sawing himself in half. Out of control like a poet.

But then Andy began to cry and Michelle couldn't launch into her manifesto claiming drug and alcohol abuse as a
feminist literary statement. Her heart cracked at the sight of Andy's crumpled face. She knew she had betrayed her. She had done it multiple times, and she knew now she could never return to Andy for she would only do it again. She did not have what it took to be faithful to her.

You Should Go, Andy, Michelle said, leaning on the parking meter.

Go? I'm not going to leave you like this. I'll bring you upstairs.

No, You Can't. That Person Is There.

That kid?

Yeah.

Well, wake her up and tell her to go. Or I will.

Michelle's roommate Ekundayo, who hated her, bounded down the stairs, giving Michelle a curt glance, more repulsion than concern, and tossed her a hostile head nod. To Andy she aimed a fat smile. Everyone loved Andy. Andy liked to give people rides home in her 1970-whatever Chevette. She was techie and would help everyone understand their computers. She was a great cook and sent people care packages with homemade soup when they were sick. Everybody felt bad that Andy's benevolent, caretaking energies had been so exploited by Michelle. No matter how much she appreciated it, Michelle would never be able to return the favor. It just was not in her.

I Can't Kick Her Out, Michelle protested. This Is Getting Too Dramatic. Her stomach soared up one way and down the other, like a pirate-ship ride at a traveling carnival. She clutched the meter.

Getting too dramatic?
Andy demanded
. I am standing above your fucking puke on the street, Michelle.
Michelle couldn't handle Andy's voice. It was outraged, pissed off, furious. That part was okay. But tunneling through it was
pain, a real hurt, a heartache, a Why? Why why why why why? Michelle couldn't handle that part. She imagined Andy's voice as a candy bar with a crunchy outside and an inside so gooey and tender it made you weep.

I'm Not Waking Her Up, Michelle said. You Have To Go.

If I go that's it. That's it, we are done. You kick her out or I'm gone.

Michelle stared down at the puddle of puke at her feet. A pale orange, like a melted Creamsicle. Soggy clots like cottage cheese. She could not drag another person into this thing, her life. Okay, she said to Andy, Okay, Go. You Should Go. She wouldn't look at her, kept her eyes trained on the vomit. That's what you make, she thought, resisting the urge to kick at it with her bare feet. That's what you get. She could hear Andy's breathing change but would not look at her.

Fuck you,
Andy breathed, hyperventilating through tears. Her hard outside and the molten inside crushed together, a broken bridge.
Fuck you, you are so fucking sick, a teenager, that is so gross, that is so fucking gross, god, I can't believe you, fuck you, fuck this, fuck you.

Michelle stayed glued to the parking meter in her turquoise Garfield nightshirt, hearing Andy go into her car, hearing her crying turn to weeping, muffled behind the glass, hearing the engine rev and purr, Andy's pride, this car, the product of so much work and money, hearing it tear away from the curb like the shriek of a nerve in pain inside the body, hearing the engine gun, standing there in the exhaust of it, like a drink thrown in her face.

Don't you ever fucking write about me!
Andy hollered, and was gone.

Michelle placed her two feet squarely in the slop of her guts, feeling the liquid push warmly between her toes. She'd
made her mess, she'd lie in it. She walked up the stone stairs and into her home, up another flight of wooden stairs, the years of grime sticking to the vomit on her feet. A flyer for some gay event stuck to her heels and she let it. She left a faint trail of bile down the hall and pushed open the door to her room. The teen stirred, cracked an almond-shaped eye. There was blood on the sheets from where she had pulled into Michelle like a pomegranate. The memory sent a tremor through her, but Michelle knew it was only an aftershock. You Have To Go, Michelle said, Now.

All right,
the teen said. It was perhaps not uncommon for her to be tossed from a strange lover's house without fanfare. She hadn't gotten undressed for their lovemaking—that was Michelle's job. She stuffed her feet into her high-tops and stood awkwardly in Michelle's cluttered room, a mess of dirty clothes and papers, books and shoes and stupid knickknacks, pictures and photos rippling from the wall in the breeze from the window. One bookshelf was an altar because Michelle was spiritual. Candles and rocks, mostly. She liked to light the candles and hold the rocks in her hands and pray for something to help her out.