Black Wave

by Michelle Tea

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.