by Michelle Tea
Another time Andy came upon not one but two Jerusalem crickets in her bathroom. They were large as frogs and humanoid, with jointed appendages and heads with little eyeballs. They seemed to have skin and it seemed to be greasy. The sight of them made Andy throw up in her mouth. They looked like nothing she had ever seen before, except maybe in B movies from the sixties where space aliens were imagined as giant bugs. She stunned them with a spatula and flipped them into a Tupperware container. She wrapped the bowl in duct tape and drove it to Michelle’s house.
Michelle’s roommate Stitch loved insects, especially the cockroaches that infested their home. She thwarted her roommates’ lazy attempts at fumigation, allowing only a nonviolent sonar gadget someone purchased on a late-night Home Shopping Network binge. You plugged the gadget into the wall and it emitted roach-repelling waves. It didn’t work. In fact, Michelle found a tiny bug stuck in its vents, seemingly drawn to the sonar. Maybe it was the equivalent of heavy metal for roaches, some enjoyed it.
Stitch believed that at this late date in the history of the earth, with more species extinct than alive, humans had to drop their preferences regarding the natural world. San Francisco used to have pumas. There had been occasional whales in its waters. Now even the butterflies were gone. They had roaches and feral cats and gangs of abandoned dogs patrolling the outskirts of town, all evolving a tolerance for the rancid bay water. They had invasive species. Burly lionfish menaced the ocean, trash speared on their venomous quills, Mad Maxes of the sea. Scavenging green crabs cannibalized the last of the natives and took out the scallops as well. Soon even these barbarians would be gone. Pirate hermit crabs with no snails to raid secreted a glue from their back and papered themselves in Snickers wrappers and sea-worn chunks of Styrofoam.
Stitch was a Taurus. She felt the damage of the natural world in some deep place inside her. She was not separate from the stinging South American ants burrowing through the backyard dirt, sculpting conical hives. Not separate from the abandoned canines living in trash caves in the Bayview. Not separate from the roaches scurrying through her kitchen each night. Their home was supporting life! That seemed crucial to Stitch, radical even, and she believed it was only a matter of time before ecopeople woke up and began championing the species they were currently scapegoating. Better invading Asian citrus beetles than no beetles at all.
Look, Stitch would point at a roach couple brazenly mating atop the microwave. They’re having sex!
They’re Making More Roaches! Michelle shrieked.
Exactly, Stitch gloated, proud that her laboratory was thriving. On a speed binge Stitch dripped globs of glow-in-the-dark paint on all the kitchen roaches and the nighttime result was breathtaking, grotesque, and psychedelic. Like a child mad scientist, Stitch had created phosphorescent cockroaches. It did work to strip the bugs of some of their ickiness and the roommates began to laugh when they came upon them, rather than shriek. Except for the time Michelle was curling up to sleep on her futon and felt something tumble from her wild, dry mane and onto her cheek. She shook it onto her pillow and screamed at the poster-paint radiance glowing atop the pillowcase.
Andy had left the Jerusalem crickets with Stitch, who had doted on them. She’d lowered their broken bodies into a terrarium and watched them die on the kitchen table—they had suffered internal damage when Andy whacked them with the spatula. Stitch kept a vigil beside them as they slowly left their bodies, a Buddhist priest ushering them to the Bardo. Their faces were uncannily human, maybe it was their wide eyes or how their heads seemed stacked on their necks. Their antennae were long and their skin seemed Caucasian. Stitch was encouraged to learn that a native bug species was apparently thriving in Bernal Hill. She hoped more would tunnel from the earth and back into Andy’s home. Stitch had never seen an insect so large and strikingly grotesque and wanted another shot at domesticating them in her plastic terrarium. But Andy knew that if she ever found one inside her home again she would have to move.
In her bed Andy took an inventory of invaders. She should have thrown a net over Michelle and cast her out. She should have smacked her with a spatula and left her for her roommates to deal with. She was like one of those long, crackled bugs that had evolved to look like sticks and leaves. Michelle had evolved to look like a normal girl, one capable of love and loyalty, one able to assist in the creation of a stable relationship, one that promoted good cheer and a feeling of safety. She had seemed true. Those last weeks had been so sweet, with popcorn in bed, the television pulled close. Watching the Westminster Dog Show, listening to doll-clutching Marilyn Manson fans defend their facial piercings on The Jenny Jones Show, getting caught up in a lurid movie on Lifetime. Andy had thought this one thing was happening, but in fact this other thing was happening. Michelle was lying in wait like a predator. She had colonized Andy’s nest and Andy had unwittingly fed her, mistook her for one of her own. Now she had found a fucking teenager? She was gross. Tears shot from the sides of Andy’s eyes and slid into her ears. From her windows she could see the planes in their holding patterns above SFO. Bright lights shining in the sky, just sitting there, not moving.
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! A
lso, 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, M
ichelle 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.