by Michelle Tea
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.