Black Wave

by Michelle Tea

On the television Kym learned how the world was making people sick. People were reporting customized blends of fatigue, ache, anxiety, and depression.

It was time, which passed faster and, therefore, more abusively than it once had.

Lesbians had long been at the forefront of environmental illnesses, shaming people for wearing scents since the 1970s. It was practically a political stance.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Michelle looked at what her roommates had done to the living room and thought that maybe she had died in such a room once, while institutionalized in a past life. It was a sickly gray green, a color selected by hospitals because it already looks sort of dirty, so any actual dirt goes unnoticed.

Wendy and Kym hated to say it but it was Michelle and her generation that were holding back the gay rights movement. When Fox News wanted to show gay people, did they bring a camera crew to Wendy and Kym’s to show two middle-aged, out-of-shape lesbians smoking cigarettes in front of the television like the rest of their audience? No. They went to people like Michelle and her friends, who seemed to only want to scar their bodies and strap rubber phalluses to their crotch.

Was their other mother really physically ill or was she profoundly depressed, mentally ill, or, even worse, was she simply a lazy bitch?

Wasn’t San Francisco full of sick lesbians, too? They had art shows and gatherings, Kym could be part of a vibrant sick community rather than wasting away on the couch.

Why don’t you just write a poem about it? No one ever really understands what a poem is about. You could hide all kinds of complaints in there.

In thirty years of owning the store, the husband had never learned how to operate the cash register. Michelle felt this was all she needed to know in order to understand Beatrice and the source of her headaches.

Michelle was taking on the persona of a slightly lunatic female drinking champagne at her kitchen table at three o’clock in the morning. There was a strength inside the tragedy of it, if you regarded it from the right angle and depending on what you wore. Drinking and smoking in a pair of sweats and a stained T-shirt was an obvious cry for help, but if Michelle teetered around her kitchen in a fluffy nightgown made in the 1950s, something pink and polyester with bits of lace and flowers, and over that wore a cover-up of sheer pink chiffon that floated out behind her when she clicked around in her golden mules, yes, mules, stuck with wavering bits of marabou—if you were wearing this and drinking champagne right from the bottle, well, something fabulous was happening! No matter that no one was there to see it. In such a getup, late-night binge drinking was acceptable.

Also, in addition to what you wore (finery) and what you drank (champagne, preferably pink, to match your finery), what you did while drinking alone late at night made the difference between alcoholic and artistic. Like if you sat at the window and cried because you had moved miles away from home and friendship and had nothing, if you were left only with the dregs of your personality, replaying everything that you had done wrong in your relationships, psychoanalyzing yourself, alternately blaming your parents and then feeling terrible and weak for blaming your parents—that would be really alcoholic. But if you sat at your kitschy 1950s kitchen table and made a gigantic scrapbook out of your life’s ephemera, turning your regret and sadness into a craft project, that was artistic.