Black Wave

by Michelle Tea

  Never mind that most of these things had been gone for some time. Beatrice was in the grip of an anxious nostalgia and she was paying Michelle an hourly rate to indulge it. She also had a migraine. And her husband’s esophagus wasn’t operating right. She left the shop soon after installing the poem behind the glass. Michelle got to work culling books from the cramped Art section.

  Joey stopped by briefly to place a copy of Metallica’s Kill ’Em All in the window beside the poem. She’s Not Going To Think That’s Funny, Michelle said. She Has Me Looking For Pictures Of Rainbows And Pine Forests. She’ll Take It Out.

  Yeah, well, Joey said sadly, with a small smile and a smaller shrug. The more Michelle worked with Joey the more he revealed and the more she enjoyed him. He was intensely mystical, new age, belonged to some faggoty men’s group that gathered in the desert and did man-witch activities. He had the important retail skill of being able to make fun of a customer to their face without them knowing it. He had a knotty, gnarled scar running up his torso from his big New York City drug overdose. Someone was in here earlier and said there was nothing to stop him from going out and killing a bunch of, um, “faggots and niggers” is what he said. That he’d just be beating the government to it.

  Oh My God, Michelle said. Who? Who Said That?

  Ted, Joey said.

  Ted, a regular bookseller, a white guy in his forties who didn’t brush his hair, who wore a track suit into the store every day to try to unload old paperbacks and cassette tapes. Though his offerings sucked, he acted like he was offering them a first edition of Catcher in the Rye.

  I Can’t Buy This, Michelle recently wagged a busted mass-market paperback at him, the pages yellowed as if urinated upon, the whole book looking sort of exploded.

  How about this? The man loaded a dingy hardcover photography book about Australia onto the counter, followed by a Chuck Palahniuk with a torn front cover.

  We Have Three Copies Of That Already, Michelle shook her head. Sorry. It was like the “sorry” you gave to a person spare-changing you on the street, only worse because Ted felt like he was working for it, really working, and you were withholding his rightful pay. He dumped a small bag of cassette tapes onto the rejected books. Red Hot Chili Peppers, Journey, Mariah Carey. The Mariah Carey was a cassingle. We’re Not Really Buying Cassettes, Michelle said uneasily. The man was glowering at her. His face was speckled with a five o’clock shadow, like a snickerdoodle that had been rolled in cinnamon sugar. He glowered at Michelle with a face she realized was desperate. Not a pleading desperate but a harder, resentful desperate. A desperation that knew itself to be pathetic and hated you for seeing it, for refusing to do the little you could to relieve it, buy the fucking Red Hot Chili Peppers cassette, what the fuck do you care anyway? It was a standoff. Michelle decided the best way to deal with the situation was to pretend she didn’t notice how completely unhinged Ted was. She shrugged, allowed a goofball grin to hit her face. She would not recognize his desperation. She would give him the dignity of her feigned obliviousness.

  She wished someone, anyone, was in the store. Beatrice, her useless husband, Matt Dillon. The store took up half the block, the building was not only the gigantic shop with its many miniforts of books and rolling carts stacked with slowly warping opera albums, beyond that cavernous room smelling of the slow rot of pages and glue was a side room stuffed with more books, books too good for the store, to be sold on eBay or at antiquarian book fairs. And the side room had its own little side room with more hoarded crap, maybe a bathroom. There was the break room at the far end of the store with a staircase leading to an upstairs room containing every cassette ever recorded. Michelle was confident they had multiple copies of that Red Hot Chili Peppers cassette stashed in the upstairs room.

  The wide store was empty of people, ringing with the bad vibes of this one customer. There were a million places he could stuff her body after he raged on her. He could jam her into a bookshelf, wall her up with Star Trek paperbacks and no one would ever find her. The guy ran a pork-chop hand through his dark hair. His hair was black and sleek and shiny except for the textured gray hairs that sprung in a tough fuzz of swirls across the top. He ran his hand through his hair and slammed it on the pile, cracking a cassette case. Michelle had wished desperately for Joey and, miraculously, he appeared.

  Ted, Joey sang in a bored tone, clapping the psychopath on the back. Joey was so good at the casual bro-down, half the customers didn’t even get that he was gay, despite his intense nellyness.

  Hey man, can you buy some of this shit?

  Joey flipped the merchandise around on the table, landing on the blasted paperback. Two bucks.

  Dude. Just give me five and I’ll give you everything. Michelle rolled her eyes. Like the asshole was doing the shop a favor, dumping a pile of garbage on the counter and charging them five bucks for it. Michelle didn’t know why she cared so much. It wasn’t her money. She realized that she’d become identified with the bookstore.

  Joey dug five bucks out of the register. The dude thanked him with a fist-bump, stuffed the bill in his tracksuit, and strode out the door, his plasticky clothing making an airy noise. The bell roped to the door clanged as he left. He’d begun ignoring Michelle the minute Joey had arrived and had never looked at her again.

  I’m Sorry, Michelle said to Joey, motioning to the pile of crap on the counter. She was shaken by the whole thing and didn’t know where to project her riled energy. I Didn’t Think I Should Buy Any Of It.

  You shouldn’t, Joey affirmed. It’s shit. But whatever. I wanted to get rid of him. He’s a writer and he’s got a heroin problem and he’ll stick around haggling forever. I just felt like I would rather pay him five dollars than deal with him.

  The guy was a junkie. A writer with a heroin problem. In Los Angeles Michelle had learned of the sources of other drugs. There was a meth trade near the gay center, a trans woman sold it or you could get it from the taco truck or from a deadbeat donut shop, all within a one-block radius. Michelle suspected Tommy the golf punk sold club drugs, and Joey, who treated his heroin addiction with weed, could hook her up if she desired. But this was the first sign of the availability of heroin, this surly asshole Ted. Many times Michelle had longed for the vinegar sting of the stuff as it tunneled through her nose, the strange drowning sensation as it hit her sinuses. Michelle knew she had run out of San Francisco three steps ahead of a physical habit—that was the point of Los Angeles, sort of. She’d wanted to stop doing so many drugs, and she had.

  Michelle didn’t want to put Ted in a mental Rolodex of people who could get her heroin, but she did anyway. She couldn’t not. Her brain, it seemed, had its own secretary and she did her job diligently. Ted. Heroin. Never mind that Michelle had only just feared him smacking her across the jaw with the staple gun and burying her alive in a pile of old jazz records. Ted. Heroin. Michelle thought that the next time he came in she would tell him that she, too, was a writer. That she had written a book. She would ask him what he was working on. Michelle hadn’t met any writers in Los Angeles—no writers working on books, anyway, if that is what this Ted character did. Michelle bet he was writing a novel. Maybe even poetry. A junkie writer desperately selling a battered copy of Fight Club was probably not writing a movie. He was starring in it. Ted. Heroin.

  Ted Threatened To Kill You? Michelle marveled.

  Ted threatened to kill faggots. Apparantly he has no idea that I am one.

  What Did You Do?

  I kicked him out.

  Michelle gazed at the glass front door, half expecting Ted to be out there, crazed, dope sick, sweating hate, a monster. Joey swished his hand.

  Whatever.

  Do We Have A Gun? Michelle asked out loud. Is There One Of Those Panic Buttons You Can Hit To Sound An Alarm If We Get Robbed?

  You think Beatrice is stashing guns around here? Joey waved his lanky arms around his head. You want a gun to protect you from Ted? Ted is fine. He’s a fucking racist homophobe drug addict and he’
ll probably kill himself off before the world actually ends. Certainly before he gets around to killing anyone else.

  Michelle wasn’t sure. She was spooked at Junkie Ted’s pronouncement, even if Joey had decided to not take it too seriously. Joey had other problems. One of his roommates wanted to hang an American flag out the window and the other roommates didn’t. The proflag roommate was working-class and the others were upper-middle-class academics and it had turned into a class war.

  Oh God, Michelle groaned, Flags. She had noticed them, too, suddenly everywhere, as if a national holiday had been declared, as if the country had triumphed in a sporting event. As if it were America that would die within a year and not the world. On her way to work she’d seen the sheet someone had hung out their front window, GOD BLESS THE USA gusted across it in spray paint. The other shops on the strip had obediently taped little flags in their windows. Beatrice, bless her heart, had refused, had placed her poem there instead, and a little peace flag, a cartoon image of a healthy planet, all blues and greens, with the hippie peace symbol on top of it. Michelle walked Junkie Ted’s book about Australia over to the window, torn between displaying its cover of the triumphant Sydney Opera House or the centerfold shot of an archaic white beach. She removed the Metallica album and handed it to Joey. He took it and swiped the peace flag, too.

  Maybe I can get my housemates to compromise with this. He gave it a sad little wag.

  It’s So Awful, Michelle said. The Planet Does Not Look Like That.

  They might as well put a smiley face on it too, Joey agreed. He lifted his face into a stupid grin and marched in place, shaking the wistful flag on its little stick. The door jangled and a small, gray-haired woman walked in.

  Judy, Joey greeted the woman, bowing at the waist, the peace flag held high.

  Hold on to that flag, Judy said. We’re going to have a neighborhood vigil. That’s the flag we want. Peace on earth. Peace for the earth.

  You want the flag? Joey asked. He thrust it at the woman. Take it. Beatrice would love for it to be in a parade.

  A vigil, not a parade, she corrected sternly. A parade! There is nothing to celebrate. But we’ve got to get out there. We’ve got to let them know we’re watching.

  Judy ran the Franklin Strip neighborhood group. She was real hustle-bustle. Michelle hated her. Judy always ignored her. When Beatrice had introduced them Judy had only glanced at Michelle impatiently, as if her presence was preventing an important conversation about permit parking from happening. Michelle had nodded awkwardly and retreated back to her project, organizing the messy Gay Fiction section in the far corner of the store.

  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.