Black Wave

1

Michelle wasn’t sure when everyone started hanging out at the Albion. She had managed to pass the corner dive for years without going inside, simply noting the dank, flat-beer stink wafting from its open doors, catching the glow of the neon sign hung above the bar — SERVICE FOR THE SICK — in hot, red loops. It seemed that all the other dives had been purchased and repurposed, renovated and sold to a different clientele. The purple-lit bar where middle-aged, working-class bulldaggers nursed beers at the counter was, overnight, converted into a heterosexual martini bar where men who smoked actual cigars drank chocolate martinis and harassed the women who passed by on Valencia. It was 1999.

Aside from the neon sign glowing its sinister pronouncement, the Albion’s other notable fixture was Fernando, a man who wore a mullet and a leather vest and carried a brown paper bag, the sort a mother will pack her child’s lunch in. It contained cocaine heavily cut with baby laxative. Michelle and her friends would pool their resources and walk into the women’s restroom with Fernando, who would tear a page from the stack of Cosmopolitan and Glamour in the corner, origami it into a little envelope, and dip it into his sack of drugs. The rumor on Fernando was that he used to work for the government, the FBI or the CIA, and was so hooked up with the most corrupt corners of the system that he was immune from being busted. Everyone felt very safe buying drugs from Fernando in the women’s restroom at the Albion.

Oh, Valencia, Michelle mourned. Michelle was a poet, a writer, the author of a small book published by a small press that revealed family secrets, exposed her love life, and glamorized her recreational drug intake. Her love life and recreational drug intake had been performed up and down Valencia Street, the main drag of San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood, once Irish, then Mexican, later invaded by a tribe bound not by ethnicity but by other things — desire, art, sex, poverty, politics. For six years Michelle had lived adjacent to this particular strip of gentrification and resistance, of commerce and SRO hotels and boutiques and taquerias. And, of late, it had changed. The Chameleon, a bar hung with velvet clown paintings, where Michelle had read her first poem to an audience, was no more. The poem had been awful, a melancholy love poem delivered in poetry voice, that stilted, up-toned lilt. She had compared her lover to a desert and her heart to a piece of cactus fruit busted up on the dusty ground. She had feared the poem was bad but rationalized that bad art had its fans and that her shabby offering would find its people. And at the close of the open mic a meek young lesbian had brought her shaved head over to Michelle and shyly thanked her.

Michelle had a special place in her heart for the Chameleon, its stage painted sloppily with giant orange flames. Its poetry event was famously unruly — all the poets were alcoholics, slamming each other in the head with chairs like professional wrestlers. That bar was Michelle’s first home in San Francisco, when she moved there from New England. She had enjoyed playing the part of the quick-witted and enraged baby dyke, she loved to clamber up to the microphone and holler at the drunks to Shut The Fuck Up! before launching into a spoken-word diatribe against pornography and child molestation. She did it well enough that the drunks stayed quiet, gave her a grudging respect afterward. When she bound her rants into xeroxed manifestos they bought them, and Michelle traded their damp dollars at the bar for pints of beer. The Chameleon was its own ecosystem, but the owner had fallen into a crack habit and so the business went under. Some French people bought it and renamed it Amnesia, as if Michelle would forget. It was so perfect it was cruel, the new name. Amnesia. Michelle marveled at it.

It seemed to be sweeping the Mission, amnesia. Every time Michelle blinked a familiar place had shimmered into an alien establishment. The Casanova had retained its name but gotten a new crowd, people Michelle had never before seen in her neighborhood. They looked like they had jobs, and money. Restaurants she could not afford to eat in were luring people from other enclaves, people once too frightened to visit the Mission, where people sold drugs and shot at one another with guns. These new arrivals wore clothing that had never been worn by anyone but them, clothing they would tire of and donate to the Salvation Army, where Michelle would buy it and wear it on this very street a year from now. There was a chain here, a cycle, Michelle could sense its churn. Anyway, the Mexican families who had been there forever had watched Michelle and her scrappy ilk invade the streets years earlier, artists and queers, damaged white people bringing dumpy coffee shops and these poetry bars. Why did she think her world wasn’t supposed to change?

Michelle pondered the question of her changing neighborhood in the darkness of the Albion, the last dive standing. A place where a cockroach once lost its grip on the ceiling and tumbled onto her notebook. A place where her checkbook was once stolen by a crackhead. Her black army bag had been slung over the back of her chair and the man was sitting behind her. Michelle had seen him and noted the scrawniness of his physique, the bug of his eyes, his cheekbones like broken glass threatening to slice through the skin of his face. Michelle played it cool. The Albion was the kind of place where one fraternized with crackheads. Go get a fucking appletini at Blondie’s if you can’t handle it, yuppie. Michelle could handle it. She gave the crackhead a nod of camaraderie — weren’t they both high on the same substance, after all? Michelle, a white girl, took her cocaine heavily cut with the aforementioned baby laxative in an inhalable line. This gentleman, African American, bought his in the smokable rock configuration. Michelle knew there were currently people in academia writing papers about this. If the man had hung around any longer she might have even bought him a beer, depending on the bonhomie quality of that evening’s cocaine, but the gentleman dipped his trembling hand into Michelle’s bag, snatched her checkbook, and took off before the bartender kicked him out. The Albion did not officially condone crack smoking. They would eighty-six you for firing your pipe in the bathroom, yet the bar had a resident cocaine salesman and people brazenly cut lines atop the glass of the pinball machine. Michelle did not condone this hypocrisy. Total bullshit.

Michelle had smoked crack cocaine only once and did not find it enjoyable.

She and her friends had been playing pool at the lesbian bar when a man with a tear tattooed beneath his eye wandered in. The man had been in prison for many years, last time he’d been free the lesbian bar had been a Mexican bar. He was confused but thirsty, and so he purchased a beer and played a game of pool with Ziggy and Stitch. Ziggy’s hair was orange as a traffic cone. She was an ex-junkie medicating her addiction with uppers and booze. She was a poet who enjoyed yelling her verse and a cook employed by the finer restaurants in San Francisco. When Ziggy got drunk her spatial cognition tanked and her lips got very wet. She would corner you in an intense conversation, keeping you pinned with her sharp green eyes, licking her lips. Michelle was into it, she loved intense conversations and getting drunk made the whole world feel severe and profound, teeming with wonder and pain. She enjoyed the company of others who could feel it — drunks and poets, mainly.

Stitch, Michelle’s housemate, was also swapping more dangerous addictions for controlled alcoholism and the occasional cocaine indulgence. A few years back, she had transitioned from femme to butch and became everyone’s project. Established butches made donations of well-worn Jack Daniel’s T-shirts. Older femmes groomed her to their liking, gifting her with outsized belt buckles and other late-nineties accessories.

The two butches played pool with the ex-con while Michelle, who hated pool, hung around sipping drinks and watching the sun go down outside the bar’s open door. The hue of the sky was the visual equivalent of the alcohol settling into her body — dusky blue shot with gold and darkening to navy. San Francisco, like many cities, had become a vampire town. The killer sun charged the pollution in the skies into a smoggy cocktail. By day, people darted from shelter to shelter like roaches stunned by sudden light, visors like riot gear shading their faces, SARS masks strung across their jaws, parasols arcing above their melanoma-spotted heads. Places of commerce opened later and later. Business visionaries inverted the workday. It was predicted that by 2010, nine-to-five would be fully replaced by five-to-nine. If everything lasted that long.

Michelle had arrived at the bar at sunset, still sleepy. The first rush of booze perked her up, the sugar infusing her with a pleasant mania before it released her into that darker, confused place where her mind became a sea that consciousness bobbed about on, rolling with the waves of passion and opinion.

Just then, a marauding band of already-drunk yuppies crashed into the bar and made a flamboyant fuss over the ex-convict’s inky teardrop tattoo—Oh my god were you in JAIL did you KILL someone? As they swarmed him, Michelle and her friends were there to tell them to back the fuck off. The three of them were just drunk enough to enjoy a righteous fight, all were perpetually pissed about the changes the neighborhood was experiencing. All three knew someone who was now making thousands of dollars playing foosball and drinking energy drinks in the break room of an Internet start-up, and all three knew someone who’d been evicted from their home to make room for a foosball-playing young millionaire. Ziggy, on the verge of eviction for months now, had sabotaged the sale of her home once already by running around the apartment half-naked with a dildo strapped to her hips when a speculative realtor came calling.

What, the gang demanded of these offensive yuppies, were they even doing in the queer bar? Were they even queer? The invaders wobbled over to the corner of the bar to regroup, and Ziggy, who spoke some shitty Spanish, asked the man with the tattoo if he could find them cocaine. He could. The trio stormed out of the bar. Michelle wondered briefly if it was a good idea for the man, only just released from prison, to be sourcing illegal drugs for a passel of queer white girls, but decided to go with the flow. It would be an experience, and Michelle was a writer.

As they cruised the Mission in Ziggy’s beat-up molester van — the windows blackened, the doors warped as if gangs of kidnapped children had tried to batter their way out — Michelle felt proud that she and her friends knew the proper and respectful way to hang out with a recent ex-convict with a teardrop tattooed on his face. The world was bigger than it had been ten minutes ago, a rabbit hole into which they could all tumble. The man was very good-looking, with a prison-yard physique, short hair, and a sort of humility. He hopped from the van on Capp Street and returned with his fist clenched around the drugs. He opened his palm.

No! Ziggy exclaimed. Coca, coca! She shook her orangey head at the substance he’d procured. This is crack. She laughed, a rueful snort. Ziggy wore a pair of goggles with lenses the same shade as her hair. She wore them strapped to her skull, just above her forehead, keeping her Kurt Cobain bob out of her face. It was like a butch headband. Ziggy’s teeth were so bad from her poverty and drug use they tumbled about in her mouth like a handful of chipped marbles. I love crack, she said sadly, and piloted the van to an empty lot in Hayes Valley, stopping briefly to purchase a special pipe off a lady crackhead on Mission. Michelle wondered for a second if there were diseases to be caught from the burned glass pipe of a career crackhead, but she had learned that fearful questions in such situations could lead to racism, to classism, to all sorts of unevolved and judgmental states of mind, and so one did not think too hard. One just accepted the chipped pipe with its charred bowl and one inhaled. And then one slid open the van door and puked onto the pavement, because crack is repulsive.

Outside the van, vines threaded themselves lushly through a chain-link fence and the parked cars sat soft, reflecting soft streetlights. It was 1999 and the earth’s decline was accelerating. Most native plants and trees were gone, leaving hardier invasive species. This one had leaves like wide, flat elephant ears, their green sheened with gloss. It had no business growing in San Francisco, but Michelle, hungry for green, appreciated it. Kids growing up now wouldn’t know any better, but Michelle had been raised among oak trees and maples, linden trees that perfumed summer nights. The town that had borne her was a shitty one, but back then even a shitty town had trees. Now even nice neighborhoods barely had a garden.

Michelle was too drunk to feel a single inhalation of crack. She leaned back in the van and watched Ziggy and Stitch fight over it — like, who was holding the pipe too long, who was owed their next hit, who had dropped a crumble of rock into the van’s carpeted shag and needed to fucking find it, now. Michelle had indulged in drugs with her friends many times and never had she seen such fiendish behavior. It was disturbing to see them acting like such dopeheads. Then Ziggy and Stitch began fooling around with the ex-con. They took turns making out with him. He was cute enough, and Michelle knew how it was to be all fucked up with no one to make out with. Ziggy and Stitch weren’t going to make out with each other — that would be gross. Michelle would be gross as well, maybe grosser. They were family. With his face stuck to Ziggy’s, the man’s hand slithered over and landed on Michelle’s leg, only to be smacked off by Stitch. Not her, Stitch snapped.

He gave Michelle a sincere apology, the inky tear suspended beneath his hangdog eyeball, and returned to Ziggy. He had only wanted Michelle to feel included, but Michelle wasn’t butch enough to mess around with men. It would be simply heterosexual, and slutty. For Ziggy and Stitch it was something else, proof of their toughness. They could tumble around with this guy and emerge from the van as queer as ever, more queer, even, and the man might now in fact be a bit queer from his time spent cracked out in Ziggy’s butch bosom. Ziggy smacked the man lightly in his face and they both smiled. Radical was the order of the day and it was not radical for Michelle, with her normal girly gender, to fool around with a guy. It would be a normal, boring, sell-out thing to do. But Ziggy and Stitch, both of them looking, acting, dressing, and smelling like boys, could do anything they wanted and be radical. They brought their radicalness into every situation and radicalized it with their presence.

Michelle caught a ghost of her reflection in the dark van window — blue hair, a bit fried from the effort. Bangs fringed her forehead, uneven, hacked off at home with a dull pair of scissors. Her kelly-green pleather coat was one of Stitch’s femme castoffs. She wore an orange slip as a dress, the tucks in the chest stitched for a woman more voluptuous than she. Its lacy neckline ballooned around her scrawny sternum. Alcohol bloat plumped her cheeks. A leopard scarf was knotted around her throat. She wore motorcycle boots on her feet, so heavy, every step demonstrating gravity. It was the end of the century.

Michelle stretched out on the van floor, leaning against the bench seat in the back, teetering between boredom and discomfort. As a writer, Michelle was happy to have smoked the crack. Having been unable to get it together and apply to college, she knew her literary education would happen on the streets. The streets were like the ocean — full of trash and beauty, and no one had the right to say which was which, not at this late date. Michelle would sit on the curb and illuminate what the tide pulled in.

Ziggy was an expert drunk driver. She took corners fast and loose, coming up on two wheels and returning to four with the grace of a pilot touching down on the tarmac. Soon Ziggy would tire of this escapade and drive her and Stitch home. Until that happened, Michelle knew her friends would make sure their new acquaintance didn’t slide his hand up the underwear she was trying to pass off as a dress. She could relax and space out, attempt to locate the effects of the drug in her body, elusive beneath the familiar roll of liquor. She yawned and checked “smoke crack” off her to-do list. The van rumbled to her door as the rumor of morning began to glimmer in the sky. Michelle felt relief. Nights she fell asleep before the sun came up were good nights. It meant that her life was under control.

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.

It’s like jazz, Ziggy explained. It’s like he’s scatting. You know? Bee diddy be bop, biddy bop, Ziggy proceeded to scat. Someone behind them hissed a shush at them. Probably the boy’s parents. On stage the poet began to beatbox, confirming Ziggy’s analysis and energizing the crowd, even Michelle. He sounded like a machine! Like a robot! How was he doing it! It was amazing! The audience began to clap along. It was impossible not to be carried away on this wave of excitement. Michelle, who loathed audience participation with a panic that approached pathology, timidly smacked her palms. Ziggy was hollering and throwing her hands in the air, making the Oo-OOOOO noise that was like a hip-hop birding call. Others responded in kind from around the studio. The boy made a sound like a needle being pulled from a record and was done. He smiled at the audience and shuffled meekly from the stage, his cloud of hair bouncing above him.

Michelle figured they were pretty much done, and then the last poet took the stage: Lucretia. Her hair was the color of faded jeans, and choppy. Everything about her was choppy — the sleeves had been sawed from her oversized T-shirt, her pants had been cropped just below the knee, high-tops puffed out around her ankles. Her face as she moved into the light was so stony it took Michelle a moment to register her as female, a recognition that immediately bled into an understanding of the teen as queer. A queer teen! Michelle turned and clutched at Ziggy wordlessly. A queer teen! Michelle and Ziggy loved queer teens. All queers loved queer teens. Queer teens triggered so much in a grown homosexual. All the trauma of their gay youths bubbled up inside them and the earnest do-gooder gene possessed by every gay went into overdrive. They wanted to save the queer teens, make sure they weren’t getting beat up at school or tossed from their homes to sleep in parks.

Nearly all the queers Michelle knew were fuckups in one way or another. Being cast out of society early on made you see civilization for the farce it was, a theater of cruelty you were free to drop out of. Instead of playing along you became a fuckup. It was a political statement and a survival skill. Everyone around Michelle drank too much, did drugs, worked harder at pulling scams than they would ever work at finding a job. Those who did have jobs underearned, quit, or got fired regularly. They vandalized and picked fights. They scratched their keys across the sides of fine automobiles, zesting the paint from the doors. Because everyone around Michelle lived like this it felt quite natural. One girl was doing an art project in which she documented herself urinating on every SUV she encountered. Everyone had bad credit or no credit, which was the worst credit. What they excelled at was feeling—bonding, falling into crazy love, a love that had to be bigger than the awful reality of everything else. A love bigger than failure, bigger than life. They clumped together in friendship with the loyalty of Italian mafiosi.

I Would Fucking Die For You, Michelle liked to tell Ziggy when they were wasted and sitting together on a curb, smoking.

I would fucking die for you too, Ziggy concurred. I would take a bullet for you. She dragged on her cigarette so powerfully the whole thing was gone in one pull. What about Stitch, would you die for her?

I Would. I Would Die For Stitch.

I would too, Ziggy nodded, without hesitation. Surely no one would ever be asked to take a bullet for another, but this was not the point. The world beyond them felt hostile, taking bullets was an emotional truth, it felt real.

On the stage the young queer seemed to know she was killing it. Michelle’s heart tore open and wept blood at the humanity of this girl’s experience. To be a butch girl in high school, to be better at masculinity than all the men around you, and to be punished for it! How everyone acts like you’re a freak when really you are the hottest most amazing gorgeous together deep creative creature the school has ever housed and you know it, somehow you know it, and everyone knows it, and no one can deal with it — oh, the head fuck of that situation, sitting on the shoulders of a teenager! Michelle’s hand was splayed on her chest like she was having a heart attack. Ziggy noticed.

Oh no, she said.

Michelle’s eyes were like a slot machine that had come up cherries. The youth looked so bitter and fierce at the smacking, stomping close of the poem, her eyes too old to be stuck in the smooth face of a teenager. She looked like she had been sustaining the ongoing tragedy of life for longer than eighteen years. Michelle’s heart had fully liquefied, was puddled somewhere else in her body.

The poet’s cheekbones were high and her tired eyes had an exotic lilt. Her dusky-blue hair, cut into no discernable style, was thick, itching to spring into curls. And her poem was good enough to win the competition.

Are We Just Picking Her Because She’s Queer? Michelle worried into Ziggy’s ear.

Ziggy shook her head. Her orange hair, separated by grease and product into individual clumps, swung like fringe. No, she’s really, really good, Ziggy said reverentially.

Better Than The Beatboxer? Michelle checked.

Better than the Beatboxer.

Beatboxing Isn’t Poetry Anyway, Michelle pointed out.

On the stage the girl accepted her trophy and did a friendly hug slash chest thump with the Beatboxer, who had come in second. Everyone who placed was masculine, had delivered poems laced with rage and anger. None of the girls, none of the little Stevie Nickses with their yearning poems of love and self-exploration, had placed. Michelle felt the sting of injustice as she observed this, then, upon remembering she was a judge, the prick of shame. She was part of the problem! Given a bit of power Michelle was no better than anyone else. Did she hate women, too? It was true she found much of the girl poetry limp and whiny, frustratingly vague. They hadn’t zeroed in on a social ill and gone to battle, they had turned their vision inward and taken the audience on a murky journey. Michelle guessed they’d all write devastating memoirs in about five years. She decided not to worry about it and went to congratulate the winner.

Mary Kay Letourneau! Ziggy shrieked, clipping her in the shoulder with their shared 40 ounce of Olde English.

What? Michelle cried. She’s Eighteen! That’s Legal!

Mary Kay Letourneau, Ziggy repeated, shaking her head. They moved together through the darkness of South Van Ness, passing Victorians protected from the street by wild invasive shrubbery and tall iron fences. The overhang of dying trees blotted the streetlights and the sidewalk was empty of people. In San Francisco’s nicer neighborhoods people with money had converted their yardscapes to pebble and driftwood, stuck here and there with spiny succulents. In the Mission nobody could afford to uproot the giants and so they eventually would tumble, crashing through a fence and onto the street, hopefully not killing anyone, blocking the sidewalk until the city came and dragged it away.

In the coming blocks hookers would suddenly materialize, women in big shoes and cheap little outfits. Sometimes Michelle would be walking alone in a similar outfit and the women would regard her skeptically, wondering if she was working their block. Men in cars would slow their roll, also inquisitive. Michelle offered smiles of solidarity to the women and flipped off the men, masking her fear with snobbish indignation, praying for them to drive away. Once, drunk, she removed a high heel and walked toward the curb as threateningly as one can with such a gait, one pump on, one pump held menacingly above her head. The would-be predator drove away. Mostly the men were simply looking to purchase sex, not terrorize anyone. Michelle understood that to truly support a prostitute meant wishing her a successful business, which translated to streets teeming with inebriated men propositioning anyone who looked slutty from their car windows. She tried to have a good attitude about it.

Michelle wrenched the 40 from her friend’s grip. She hated sharing anything with Ziggy, who bogarted the booze and whose strangely wet lips soaked cigarette filters. Once Michelle hit her Camel Light only to have Ziggy’s saliva ooze from the spongy tip. Ziggy would not take a languid, gentle inhalation but a stressed-out trucker pull, one and then another, making the cigarette hot, the tip a burning cone. Michelle did not know what to do with such a cigarette. She would rather buy Ziggy a carton of Camels than share a smoke with her, but she was stuck. Ziggy was her best friend and everyone was broke.

Ziggy was both scandalized and delighted by Michelle’s love-at-first-sight encounter with the teenager. Her walk when newly drunk became a sort of dance, she swiveled out from her hips as she slid down the street. Like many butches, Ziggy dealt with her feminine hips by weighing them down with a lot of junk. A heavy belt was threaded through the loops of her leather pants. The word RAGGEDY was spelled in metal studs across the back, as if you could not simply see for yourself. All the dykes had recently discovered the shop in the Castro where leather daddies got their belts, vests, caps, and chaps. A bearded fag resembling the Greek god Hephaestus would pound the word of your choice into the leather with bits of metal. It was expensive, but worth it if you had it. Ziggy went from rags to riches regularly, scoring jobs at yuppie restaurants and then slipping on a wet floor and throwing her back out. She blew her cash on leather goods and rounds of tequila for everyone, plus some cocaine and maybe a nice dinner in a five-star restaurant where service people treated her like a pig. Whatever was left over was given away to people on the street, and then it was back to bumming cigarettes off her friends.

But Ziggy’s hips: a Leatherman was snapped to the belt, like a Swiss Army knife but more so. The gadget flipped open into a pair of pliers with a world of miniature tools fanning out from the handles. Screwdriver, corkscrew, scissors, tweezers. The Leatherman was a lesbian phenomenon and life ran more smoothly because of it. Ziggy had that on one hip and a Buck knife in a worn leather sheath on the other. A hankie forever tufted from her back pocket, corresponding to the infamous faggot hankie code. The hue, pattern, or even material flagging from Ziggy’s ass transmitted the desire for a particular sexual activity, right or left pocket communicated whether the butch would prefer the giving or receiving end. Ziggy’s tastes were varied and shifting and hankies of many sort danced between her pockets. That night a flash of lamé dangled from her right cheek, signaling her wish to be fucked by a fancy femme.

In Ziggy’s other pocket sat a leather wallet, hooked to her belt loop with a swag of silver chain. The nights Ziggy packed, yet another layer of leather and metal would be rigged across her hips, a heavy dildo curled in her underwear. The overall affect of these accessories was not unlike a woman dancing the hula in a skirt of shells and coconuts, or belly dancers draping their bellies in chain mail. The swinging, glinting hardware propelled Ziggy forward from her core, and, though your eyes were drawn to the spectacle, the flash obscured the femininity — like dazzle camouflage. A lot of butches wore this look, but Ziggy did it best.

Gay Men Fuck Younger Boys All The Time, Michelle said fiercely.

Okay, NAMBLA, Ziggy snorted. Okay, NAMBLA Kay Letourneau.

Not Like That, Michelle said. Just — You Know What I Mean. Older Fags And Younger Fags, Like Legally Young. Daddies. Zeus And Ganymede.

Ganymede was a child, Ziggy schooled her.

Yeah, You Were There, Michelle retorted, On Mount Olympus. You Were Working The Door. You Carded Ganymede. Michelle’s joke reminded her of a true story in which Ziggy picked up a girl with hair so short there was almost nothing for her Hello Kitty barrettes to clamp onto and who wore a pink dog collar around her neck. The girl left her ID on Ziggy’s bedroom floor by accident. She hadn’t been old enough to get into the bar where Ziggy’d seduced her.

That’s not the same thing, Ziggy defended. That girl lied to me. Just by being in the bar she was pretending to be at least twenty-one. That was not my fault.

So, Michelle said, If That Poet Lied To Me About Her Age It Would Be Okay?

It’s too late, Ziggy said scornfully, swigging the Olde English. You met her at the Teen Poetry Slam. It is too late for you, NAMBLA Kay Letourneau. Ziggy’s hips swiveled as she skipped along. She sashayed down the block, nearly running into a shriveled old crackhead woman who had emerged from the mouth of an SRO hotel. At least Michelle thought she was old. She might have been thirty, but crack is such an evil potion it turns maidens to hags in a season.

You know what to do!!!! the woman croaked in a prophetic timbre. Her lips were split with dehydration and cancer. Do it! Do! It! Do it now! Do it now! Michelle and Ziggy looked at one another, alarmed. Lifelong city dwellers, both were accustomed to the spooky public outbursts of addicts and crazy people, but Ziggy tended to treat them as oracles dispensing coded messages.

Do what?! Ziggy asked, suddenly desperate. Do what?! Oh god! I feel like that woman just looked into my soul! Ziggy’s eyes got the focused-unfocused look that only a drunk Pisces with eyes that color green could achieve. She retraced her steps and pulled a palmful of coins from the tight front pocket of her leather pants. She placed them in the woman’s chickeny hand.

You know, she told Ziggy. A bright piece of her fabric wound around her head and her eyes stared out from the cave of her face. You know!

I do, Ziggy replied solemnly.

Michelle thought Ziggy was probably crazy herself, but there was a chance she wasn’t and that the street people of her neighborhood were, in fact, prophets, apocalyptically wise, witches damaged from being born into a time with no respect for magic. Michelle preferred this story over the alternative of everyone having chemical imbalances and genetic predispositions toward alcoholism. She supported Ziggy and helped her puzzle out the cryptic warning of the street oracle.

Is There Anything You Think You Should Do Right Now? Michelle asked.

Ziggy thought.

Write a novel? she mused. Ziggy stuck to poetry, but it was hard to make money as a poet and Ziggy really liked money. Another option was moving to Los Angeles to direct films but that seemed like such an intense thing to do. Apply for a grant? She dug deep. I was thinking about doing yoga, she said. Recently Ziggy had briefly dated a bicurious yoga instructor who kicked everyone’s ass at pool. Prana, the girl, smiled after sinking the final ball, raising her fingers to the barroom ceiling in a spiritual gesture.

You Want To Do Some Yoga And Improve Your Pool Game? Michelle asked. One of the errant ways Ziggy brought in extra cash was pool sharking. Another was shining shoes with an old-fashioned shoeshine kit she lugged from bar to bar, a butch version of those Peachy Puff girls selling cigarettes and candy and useless light-up plastic roses. Just as the Peachy Puffs wore ridiculous and sexy costumes resembling the spangled outfits little girls tap dance in, Ziggy knew which garments would appropriately fetishize her labor. She shined shoes in a stained wifebeater and a tight pair of Levi’s.

Maybe She Was Talking To Me? Michelle suggested. Do It. Like Make Out With The Poet.

The teen, Ziggy corrected.

Lucretia, Michelle insisted. But the name was such a mouthful. Was it her real name? she wondered. San Francisco was full of people who changed their names upon moving to town. Trash Bag, Spike, Monster, Machine, Scout, Junkyard, Prairie Dog, Flipper, Oakie, Fiver, Kiki, Smalley, Rocks, Rage, Sugar, and Frog were only some of the individuals Michelle had met since coming to California. I don’t think you should do it, Ziggy said.

The thing was, Michelle had a girlfriend. Her last name was Warhol so everyone called her Andy, though the name on her driver’s license was Carlotta. Andy was on a lesbian soccer team. Michelle liked to watch her spike the ball with her head like an aggressive seal. Andy cooked meals at an AIDS hospice in the Castro. She was older than Michelle and had been doing this for many, many years and had been around for the terrible era when gay men were dying and dying and dying and dying. Michelle had assumed Andy prepared healthful, nourishing, life-prolonging foods for these men, but as they all had death sentences what she did was cook them their last meals, again and again. Pork chops, ribs, mashed potatoes, mac and cheese, fried chicken. Hamburger Helper when it was requested (and it was). Meat loaf, loafed from whatever meat could be found. Cupcakes and brownies and pies with ice cream. Andy fed Michelle, too. It was a foundation of their relationship. Without Andy there were many times when Michelle would have gone hungry, so broke and barely employable was she, so hell-bent on prioritizing liquor above food. Wasn’t Beer Bread? Michelle asked in earnest. Liquid Bread? Especially Guinness, didn’t they give Guinness to pregnant women in some country (Ireland she supposed), and wasn’t Michelle Irish, didn’t years of ethnic evolution give her a genetic gift for absorbing the nutrients in a pint of beer?

Generally, people who did not drink like Michelle — let’s call it heavily — generally, these types of people would not want to date her. It was unusual how Andy not only accepted Michelle’s inebriation but encouraged it. She bought her jugs of beer beyond Michelle’s normal price range. She procured pills from folks at work and urged Michelle to take them. This dynamic inspired in Michelle a variety of emotions. Sometimes she felt like a helpless princess being attended to by a handsome butch. When Andy was a little girl she prayed to unicorns to not get boobs, and it worked. Andy was white as a ghost with a head full of black, black hair. Her black hair fell into a natural Superman swirl on her forehead. Andy was attractive in the manner of an old-fashioned movie star, Michelle thought, or maybe it was her chivalry, if chivalry was what it was. Sometimes Michelle worried that Andy just wanted to knock her out so that she didn’t have to deal with talking to or fucking her. Michelle tended to never shut up and she wanted big drama in bed all the time, requiring her lover to be a roller coaster or tsunami.

Michelle and Andy were not faithful to one another. Theirs was a messily open relationship, one in which the boundaries were never fully articulated so could never be fully broken. In spite of this, there was the feeling that Michelle was shitting on the rules all the time with her haphazard acquisition of lovers.

An example: She had an affair with a junkie troubadour named Penny. Penny sang Johnny Thunders songs on her acoustic guitar as they walked through the industrial wasteland of her neighborhood, Dogpatch, a place not yet gentrified, with vacant storefronts and SRO hotels, in one of which Penny lived. Penny had tangled black hair that clawed out from her head like Medusa. She wore spandex pants and clunky boots with broken zippers. The boots barely stayed on her feet so there was always the exciting possibility that Penny would wipe out. Walking down the street with her was like watching a circus acrobat. Penny’s small room was padded with thrift-store clothing, mounds of it. They made out on a mattress on the floor, a muted black-and-white television strobing behind them.

In the morning, though, panic woke Michelle like an alarm clock. Who was this elegant skeleton she was curled into? This hair had a new smell, the dusty stink of Aqua Net Extra Super Hold and a drugstore perfume worn as a joke and also dirt and sweat and the tang of heroin itself, brown sugar and spoiled wine. Though Penny was who she’d wanted last night, slow kisses tasting of new intoxicants, Andy was who she wanted to wake up with, the shore she longed to beach herself upon. Michelle peered through makeup-crusted eyes at the collection of clothes making drifts up the walls — she would be smothered in an earthquake. Penny shambled out of bed, so frail in the daylight, and rutted through the base of a pile, extracting something that shimmered like the scales of a magical fish. She pulled it over the torn slip dress she’d passed out in and left to throw up in the bathroom down the hall.

Michelle fled. She wheeled about Dogpatch, an unfamiliar neighborhood. The apocalyptic times that were upon them glared from every bit of rubble, every mound of festering shit left by the packs of wild dogs she hoped she would not run into. Did buses even run out here? How had she arrived? Penny had met her on the corner, with her guitar. She had strummed “You Can’t Put Your Arms around a Memory,” singing it with a cracking voice. Penny really was like a girl Johnny Thunders. Someone had tattooed the lyrics to “Chinese Rock” on her shoulder with a sewing needle. It was a spidery tattoo, the lines shook crooked down her skin, but it worked with her look.

Penny was indeed amazing, but Michelle worried there was a time limit on that sort of amazing. That it was the sort of amazing that could begin to look sad with age. Michelle fought against this analysis, which seemed cruel and typical. The messed-up queers Michelle ran with tempted fate daily, were creating a new way to live, new templates for everything — life, death, beauty, aging, art. Penny would never be pathetic, she would always be daring and deep, her addiction a middle finger held up to proper society. Right? Right?

Andy had her own love intrigues, one with a shy photographer who’d grown up in Alaska. Andy insisted that this was not as glamorous as it sounded. Alaska! Michelle projected sleighs and fur coats onto the girl, who she had never met but whose name was, amazingly, Carlotta, same as Andy’s. Like getting to go into the same public restroom, having a date with your exact name was a whimsical perk of lesbianism. Michelle imagined this Carlotta as a femme twin of Andy, standing on a windswept glacier wearing a fluffy hat cut from the pelt of a baby seal. No matter that the glaciers had long ago melted into floods and that baby seals were cartoony memories surviving on as stuffed animals. Unlike some of the younger people she was friends with, Michelle had remembered the hype of Alaska, had seen it on TV, had understood the state’s brand. But all it had had going for it was the natural abundance thing, so when the planet started to die, Alaska had been one of the first states to tank.

Michelle was, for the most part, happy that Andy was having affairs, unless she wasn’t, and then she would demand painful information from her girlfriend.

Did You Touch Her Boobs? Michelle interrogated. Did You?

Andy bristled under these demands and the pair fought. Michelle hated when a pane of lead came down over Andy’s heart, Andy who was always so ready to serve her, to bring her eggs and cider. Where had she gone? Michelle was in tears.

I Only Want To Know If You Touched Her Boobs! she cried. Andy was Michelle’s girlfriend. She had a right to know.

Michelle had a second affair with a mannish girl named Captain who hosted lots of drugged-out after-parties in her bedroom above Valencia Street. Andy rarely stayed out late, but Michelle often did not make it back to her futon until the nighttime sky began to brighten with the coming day. Michelle’s calculations were as anxious as a vampire’s — she had to be asleep before sunrise or she would panic that her life was out of control, but the inevitable end of a party always broke her heart. She would push it to the extreme last moment, dashing down Valencia in a pair of shoes so worn-down that the nub of a nail stuck out from the heel, one step ahead of the rising sun.

In Captain’s room everyone listened to Pavement and Elliott Smith and licked powdered pyramids of ecstasy from their palms. Before Michelle fell into debilitating bliss, she and Captain bonded over astrology and Captain let her pluck a card from her Salvador Dali tarot deck. Paralyzed by the drug, they made out on Captain’s bed for about five hours, their friends heaped around them like the sea lions that once honked down at the piers. Latecomers brought nitrous and the crack and hiss of the slender canisters became the sound track to their slow-motion kisses. On and on this went, time made obsolete by chemicals. Captain was not an amateur — her windows were hung with black curtains, the room as immune to the passage of time as a Vegas casino.

Michelle and Captain went on a date to the bathroom of the lesbian bar. Michelle’s ass, perched on the sink, bumped the cold-water faucet as she came in Captain’s face, soaking her backside and wetting Captain’s long bangs. She mopped up with scratchy paper towels and left to meet Andy for dinner. Rushing through the Mission, Michelle gave her hands a sniff. Captain had allowed Michelle to ransack her and Michelle’s fingers stunk of her good fortune. She popped into a liquor corner store and purchased a pack of watermelon Bubblicious, chewed a piece until it was fattened and gritty with sugar and spit, and scoured her hands with it. Her hands were sticky and disgusting but they smelled like fruit, not sex, and Michelle felt better. Andy knew she was being a slut, but she didn’t have to rub her girlfriend’s nose in it.

Together, Andy and Michelle had an affair with a girl named Linda. Michelle had found Linda at the bookstore where she worked and was excited by the girl’s willingness to consume large quantities of drugs and alcohol. Sometimes Michelle felt resentful toward Andy for being so moderate, for sipping some ridiculous fake drink like a daiquiri while Michelle got hammered on shots and cocaine. Andy would go home at a reasonable hour, abandoning Michelle at the bar, but Linda would party until her intake knocked her out. On their second date Michelle petted the girl’s head as it hung out the window of a party, sending streams of barf onto the street below. When she was finished the pair found a closet in a bedroom and had sex, Linda’s forearms, tattooed with rockets, shooting into Michelle’s deep space. Eventually Michelle flipped Linda, working her hand inside the girl for about ten minutes before realizing she had passed out. Michelle put her clothes back on and rejoined the party, leaving Linda tucked beneath a leather coat.

Andy could recognize the threat of Linda. Unlike Penny or Captain, virtual one-night stands, Michelle kept returning to Linda. She talked about her too much, in that wistful way. Everything about Linda became sort of magical. She Wants To Own A Flower Shop, Michelle gushed. That’s Her Big Dream, Isn’t That Sweet? Andy thought it was actually pretty stupid, seeing as how there weren’t really flowers anymore, and her concern swelled. Michelle loved the tattoos on Linda’s calves, the Little Prince on one leg and Tank Girl on the other. When Andy named six other girls who had either one of those tattoos, Michelle iced her for the rest of the day. Linda wore slips as dresses, just like Michelle. She wasn’t butch and wasn’t femme, she was kiki, a 1960s throwback. Her hair was sort of greasy, which was right for the time. People were buying expensive hair products to make their locks hang as limply as Linda’s home-cut bob. She would bundle the length of it into twin buns on her head, like animal ears. Linda’s face was round, and since Michelle was so often looking up at her in darkness she began to think of it as the moon, the way it caught the light and glowed. Linda was raised in a hippie commune in Vermont. She was so obsessed with corn dogs she planned on getting one tattooed on her shoulder.

Andy conceded defeat and joined their affair, which had the desired result of squashing it. Everyone felt bad at the end. Linda had bitten Andy on the lip and given her a cold sore, so now Andy quietly held Michelle responsible for having contracted oral herpes. Michelle felt like her libido was out of control and this made her feel crazy and ashamed. Linda felt that where she perhaps should have had boundaries she in fact had none. She started hanging around with Ziggy, staying out all night and showing up for her morning shift at the bookstore looking positively greenish.

What Did You Guys Do? Michelle asked Linda after one such evening. Michelle had been home in bed with Andy, watching television and eating popcorn. She was trying to live a different life, and was worried about her ex, if that’s who Linda was.

I smoked crack, Linda whispered, scandalized by herself.

Oh My God! Michelle gasped, Be Careful! She tried to talk to Ziggy about it later. Don’t Smoke Crack With Linda, she begged her friend. Ziggy was tough and could handle herself in the druggie jungles of the Mission, but there was something vulnerable about Linda, something defenseless. Michelle could imagine her falling into the gutter and never coming back. She was too gentle, she’d be a goner. Michelle would find herself giving Linda spare change as she walked home from a bar five years from now.

Ziggy was annoyed at Michelle getting all nosy about Linda. Linda’s fine, she said. Linda’s a grown-up. Ziggy resented Michelle’s suggestion that she was a bad influence on the girl, plus a little hurt that Michelle wasn’t worried about her drug intake, too. She had initiated the crack adventure and consumed far more of it than Linda. What did that say about her, then? Was she already written off as a waste case, beyond help? Ziggy thought there was maybe no one in the world that worried about her. The conversation had made her feel terribly alone, and a fracture thin as a spider web had begun to climb the surface of their friendship.

Linda wasn’t all that long ago, Ziggy reminded Michelle as she pondered the teen poet Lucretia. Michelle had made many pledges to Andy, both spoken aloud and deep in her heart. I Will Never Do That Again, she had promised, referring to Linda. How many lovers did a person need, anyway? Why was she so greedy? In her heart she prayed to whatever was listening, Please Don’t Let Me Forget How Much I Love This.

Later, she was lying fully wrapped around her girlfriend, her face nuzzled in the glossy sweet stink of her pomaded hair. Royal Crown, the grease came packed in such an aesthetically pleasing container, squat and round, its tin cover pin-poked into a relief of a royal crown. It was rumored to be Elvis’s pomade, and even Michelle would rub some into her long, wet hair to make it fragrant and less burned-out looking. It smelled like oily flowers, like the worn pillowcases of long-ago lovers. Michelle worried as she pushed her face into her girlfriend’s hair that the product would give her zits, but she did it anyway, feeling devotion surge through her: Please Don’t Let Me Forget How Much I Love Andy. But she would.

5

Michelle came upon Lucretia at the Albion. This is fate! she thought. Yippee! She wanted to grab Ziggy and tell her the news — What Were The Chances? — but Ziggy was deep in a pool game with Fernando the Coke Dealer and she’d just ruin Michelle’s shot at romance or whatever anyway.

Hi! she said to the teen. What Are You Doing Here? Michelle could hear the words coming out too strong, too excited. She didn’t know how to play it cool.

Huh? asked the teen. She did not recognize Michelle. She had met her for two seconds after someone had thrust a trophy into her hand, all she remembered was the trophy.

I Was The Judge At The Teen Poetry Slam! Michelle gushed. I’m A Queer Poet Too! She stressed queer not because she walked around identifying as a queer poet but so that the youth understood she would fuck her.

Oh, Lucretia remembered, Right, thanks for that. My name is Lace—

Michelle! screamed Michelle. And she hadn’t even had any cocaine yet. She was just buoyant, it was her nature.

Yeah, yeah, I remember. Listen though, my name is Lacey. She said the name intensely, and through gritted teeth. Lacey. She flashed an ID at Michelle with the photo of a blond girl who appeared to have renewed her license on the heels of a Caribbean vacation. Her hair was knit into ridiculous bead-tipped cornrows and between the braids ran little aisles of sunburned scalp. LACEY JOHNSON, it read.

You Don’t Look Anything Like That, Michelle said, laughing. Are You Kidding?

Lucretia shrugged. They don’t care what I show them as long as I show them something. It’s just to cover their own ass.

Where Did You Get It? Michelle asked.

It was in a purse I stole, said the juvenile delinquent, boastful and sheepish at once, a combination Michelle found very attractive, though not nearly as irresistible as the crime itself. A flush of something billowed like steam through her body. Michelle had great admiration for criminals and crime, though only from a distance. To be so close to a purse snatcher was heady. Why should this blond girl, Lacey, have a nice purse, a safe life, when no one else did? Lacey, who vacationed in third world countries and wore culturally appropriated hairstyles. Also, Michelle could not imagine a way to get a fancy purse aside from stealing it, and if that was her option she might as well embrace it. Might as well make a religion out of it, a Robin Hood lifestyle. Michelle had read Jean Genet: I recognize in thieves, traitors, and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty — a sunken beauty, wrote the faggot. And Lucretia was beautiful. Her lips were full and sullen. Her eyes were almonds, the skin of her face was almond, her hair was lush, and she moved like a boy.

It was Lucretia who invited Michelle into the women’s restroom for a line of Fernando’s cocaine. This would be very important later, when Michelle would be charged by her friends of corrupting a youth, a queer one. Corrupting? Lucretia who spoke of spoonfuls of heroin, tiny puddles of sweetness and vinegar, Lucretia who knew where to get speed so pure it was lavender, like crushed amethyst.

It was Lucretia’s high school graduation money that had purchased a supersized bindle from Fernando, Lucretia’s fake ID that muddled the powder on the back of the toilet, and Lucretia’s twenty that got rolled up and stuck into Michelle’s nose. But it was Michelle who was unable to stand the awkwardness of being so close to the teen, her blood newly boiling with amphetamines. It was Michelle who blurted in her characteristic way, Want To Make Out? And the youth grabbed her by the chin.

Any flicker of fidelity to Andy was sucked from her throat. Lucretia kissed Michelle like she was in love with her already. She kissed her like she’d been shipwrecked on an island, notching each stranded day onto a fallen coconut, slowly losing her mind. She filled Michelle like weather, worked her mouth like a cherry stem being tongued into a knot. Michelle had nevernevernever been kissed like this. Michelle had always thought that kissing was like coming upon a golden trunk lodged in the ocean floor. She tried to tug it open but never could, and this was okay because she still beheld the luminous trunk in all its splendor. But Lucretia knocked the chest right open. With one wrenching motion Michelle’s sea was full of coins and rubies, strands of pearls floating like fish in the waters. The clichés of physical love were suddenly available to her. Her knees were weak. She was seeing fireworks. She had butterflies in her stomach. It didn’t occur to her that it might be the cocaine.

Michelle barely recalled phoning Andy. She had the blurriest memory of bumming coins off someone to use the pay phone. No one but yuppies had cell phones then, yuppies and, inexplicably, Ziggy, though she would often lose hers while drunk. Cradling the heavy black receiver that stank like beer breath, Michelle told Andy she’d made out with someone, a teenager. Andy’s hurt was a cloud on the other end of the line, one that picked up energy, velocity, and humidity as the clock ticked on Michelle’s quarter. But between the liquor and the kiss, Michelle felt anesthetized to Andy’s pain.

I’m Going Home With Her, she told her girlfriend. Andy could hear the slur of Michelle’s slow-mo lips forming the words.

Michelle, Andy said. Should she be angry or tragic? Manipulative or permissive? Cry, yell, guilt, act like she didn’t fucking care, should she just end this relationship once and for all? The thought of getting back on the non-monogamy roller coaster sickened her, and the realization that she had never actually gotten off, that the calm between Linda and this moment had simply been a mellower part of the ride, made her feel sicker still.

You’re like a butterfly, Andy had once flattered Michelle in the midst of an affair. She’d been working toward viewing Michelle as an ethereal, liberated creature, something with wings, something whose freedom she, Andy, was charged with protecting. It had worked for about five minutes. Indeed, Michelle seemed more like some sort of compulsively rutting land mammal, a chimera of dog in heat and black widow, a sex fiend that kills its mate. Or else she was merely a sociopath. She was like the android from Blade Runner who didn’t know it was bad to torture a tortoise. She had flipped Andy onto her belly in the Armageddon sun and left her there, fins flapping.

The quarter ran out and Andy held a dead line in her hand. She lay back in her bed but she did not sleep. She thought of the occasional feral creature that crawled into her house, a converted basement apartment cut into the side of Bernal Hill. Animals sometimes came through her open window. Once a tomcat with enormous balls rocking between his back legs and a stunned bird in his mouth sauntered in. Andy shooed the tomcat back onto the hillside and used her bedsheet to net the bird flying crookedly around the apartment. Birds were increasingly rare in the dead wildness of Bernal, the neighborhood had become a sort of petrified forest. Andy brought the bundle into her yard, feeling the bird flutter weakly inside the sheet. She unveiled the animal to the night sky with a flourish, like a magician releasing conjured doves. Andy’s heart tilted in her chest as she watched the crazed thing loop and smack into the side of the house. It landed with a feathery thwaaap! and Andy went back into her basement. She did not want to know if it had collected itself back into the air or not. It looked like a cowbird anyway. A parasitic nonnative. The moms dumped their eggs into nests of native birds, leaving them there to be raised by the adoptive parents. The cowbirds were bigger and bossier and commanded all the food, and so the native babies starved. There was once a huge cowbird population on the hill, but even they were becoming scarce as the other birds died away, leaving no one for the invaders to con food out of. It depressed Andy.

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! Also, 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, Michelle 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.

Don’t you ever fucking write about me! Andy hollered, and was gone.

Michelle placed her two feet squarely in the slop of her guts, feeling the liquid push warmly between her toes. She’d made her mess, she’d lie in it. She walked up the stone stairs and into her home, up another flight of wooden stairs, the years of grime sticking to the vomit on her feet. A flyer for some gay event stuck to her heels and she let it. She left a faint trail of bile down the hall and pushed open the door to her room. The teen stirred, cracked an almond-shaped eye. There was blood on the sheets from where she had pulled into Michelle like a pomegranate. The memory sent a tremor through her, but Michelle knew it was only an aftershock. You Have To Go, Michelle said, Now.

All right, the teen said. It was perhaps not uncommon for her to be tossed from a strange lover’s house without fanfare. She hadn’t gotten undressed for their lovemaking — that was Michelle’s job. She stuffed her feet into her high-tops and stood awkwardly in Michelle’s cluttered room, a mess of dirty clothes and papers, books and shoes and stupid knickknacks, pictures and photos rippling from the wall in the breeze from the window. One bookshelf was an altar because Michelle was spiritual. Candles and rocks, mostly. She liked to light the candles and hold the rocks in her hands and pray for something to help her out.

All Right, Michelle repeated, looking at her toes. She glanced up quickly at the teen. Thanks For All That. She allowed herself a smile. She didn’t want to be a bitch.

Who was that downstairs? Lucretia asked.

My Girlfriend, Michelle lied, but it did the trick.

Oh, okay. I better get out of here, huh?

Yeah, Sorry. Michelle allowed herself a larger, more regretful smile and showed it to the youth: not my fault.

Well, that was fun, said the teen. Really, Lucretia seemed fine, totally fine after a night snorting heroin, a drug famous for being so bad and awful. She hadn’t puked and she seemed really coordinated. Look at how much a person deteriorates in ten years, Michelle thought. The night had left her barfy and haggard, her life now destroyed. Lucretia gave her a swift peck on the cheek and bounded out the door. She was halfway to the stairs when she turned. Hey, where am I?

The Mission, Michelle said. Fourteenth Street. Michelle could see that this wasn’t enough information to orient the teen, but, not wanting to seem stupid, Lucretia gave a sharp nod.

Thanks. She was down the stairs and out the door.

7

In the lesbian bar Stitch pulled her wallet from the ass of her baggy black jeans to pay for Michelle’s drink. She wore a cowboy hat on her head and a faded beer T-shirt on her body. She flirted with the bartender, another butch. All the butches were seething with sexual tension for one another. They chased and dated femmes, girly-girls, keeping their clothes on in the bedroom, and then hooked up with each other like straight dudes on the DL, pushing their fists up each other’s pussies.

Stitch had the word GENIUS tattooed on her stomach and the quadratic formula tattooed on her neck. Her knuckles looked like a calculator keyboard, marked with + and —, % and <. Michelle thought if Stitch hadn’t been a fuckup she could’ve maybe been the next Einstein. She liked to imagine who her friends could have become if they hadn’t been saddled with a low-grade PTSD from being queer, if they hadn’t been forced into the underground, away from the world and its opportunities. Stitch would have been Einstein, Copernicus. She was obsessed with the astronomer Tycho Brahe, who had lost his nose in a duel and tied a golden prosthesis around his head with a ribbon. Stitch tagged GOLD NOSE in barroom bathrooms and bus-shelter walls with Sharpies. She would have been Jane Goodall, Jacques Cousteau. She would have been a marvelous surgeon, her urge to slice herself, her friends, and her lovers with sharp objects redirected toward healing. Stitch talked to Michelle about math the way Michelle talked about poetry, so that it became understandable, even beautiful, a natural language that was both the code and the decoder.

Michelle was scared and attracted to the strange things Stitch did to her body — the cuttings, how she once heated up the decorative edge of an antique spoon and attempted to sear the design into the skin of her arm. It didn’t work, what she got was a blistered blob, but the idea had been such a good one. In the nineties in San Francisco artistic self-mutilation was not an uncommon way to pass the time. You could pay people to cut swirls into your skin, to brand you like a heifer on a ranch. Once at a lesbian dance party Michelle witnessed the spectacle of a girl sewing up her labia on the bar top. At another club a giant skewer was pushed through a girl’s face, entering her cheek, sliding through her mouth, and coming out the other side. Michelle had seen crowns of pins crisscrossing a shaven skull, she had seen more needles stuck in chests and breasts and sternums. Such scenes became normal astonishingly fast, especially if you were inebriated all the time. Drunk at a party, she once allowed Ziggy to push one such needle through the place where her third eye pulsed weakly, a lighthouse stuck in fog. Michelle barely bled, just a tiny splotch of blood, dry and sticky. She figured it was because she was so dehydrated.

Outside the bathroom Ziggy chugged a pint of beer and shot pool. Who would Ziggy have been if she had been born into a different place and time, a different gender, with different desires? Ziggy would’ve maybe been David Lynch, maybe Charles Bukowski. Actually, Ziggy was Charles Bukowski. She was that drunk and clever and ornery, that prolific, filling up notebook after notebook with her poems and then losing them. She lost her notebooks regularly, followed by a full day of mourning and angst and then Oh well, what the fuck and she would get to filling up a fresh one with her words. What would it take for Ziggy, queer Ziggy, to ascend to the peak Bukowski died upon? She couldn’t. She was a whiny woman, a complaining queer. In order to have your complaints listened to in this world you couldn’t have that much to really complain about. Otherwise, Ziggy could have been Malcolm McLaren — someone in the shadows who had all the power, you could not see her but you could smell the smoke from her cigar, hear the rustle of dollars in her pocket. Men in suits would flock to Ziggy for her opinion, and they would pay her handsomely for it.

Stitch brought Michelle her cocktail and gave her a soft pat on the back. Michelle accepted the cocktail coldly, with a nod at her roommate. Come on, Stitch complained, Stop being like this, you’re being mean. You’re making a really big deal about nothing.

After Michelle had said goodbye to Lucretia she had walked down the long hallway, the soles of her feet still sticky with barf, toward the kitchen, where she intended to clear her head with a pot of Café Bustelo. It was with shock that she noticed her living room had been painted.

We did it like a week ago, Stitch shrugged. You weren’t around to talk to, you’re like never here anyway. So we painted the living room. Who cares?

Michelle cared. The living room was wide and high ceilinged. A giant, busted sofa ran the length of one wall, its cracking plastic stabbing your thighs. It had been there when Michelle moved in seven years ago and her hunch was that its origin was the streets. Along another wall ran a low bookshelf and another wall sported a glass-paned built-in cabinet also stuffed with books: Bastard out of Carolina, School of Fish, Macho Sluts, Infinite Jest. Zines, their fragile pages crimped and torn. Issues of Love and Rockets, not in any kind of order. Lesbian Land, Girlfriend Number One, Hello World, The New Fuck You, Chelsea Girls, Trash, Memories that Smell Like Gasoline, How I Became One of the Invisible. Tiny, precious Hanuman books. Because You’re a Girl, The Madame Realism Complex, I Love Dick, Go Now, The Basketball Diaries, T.A.Z., Angry Women, Shy, The Letters of Mina Harker, The Bell Jar, Queer, Howl, Lunch Poems, Sex Work, Closer, Hell Soup, The Unsinkable Bambi Lake, Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, I Married an Alien, Monkey Girl, Discontents, The Terrible Girls, Bad Behavior. The final wall was a giant window. It looked out onto the cluster of backyards at the center of their block, a mess of dull straw, dead landscaping, fallen trees, and clotheslines tangled with those hardy apocalypse vines. Their own house had nothing out back but a foot of concrete and a foot of dirt where their trash barrels lived.

The glass window was punctured by a BB from a long-ago neighbor. When Michelle first moved in one of the straight girls had told her not to sit near the window during a sports championship or New Year’s because the Mexicans in the neighborhood liked to fire off their guns in celebration. Michelle thought this was racist, but Michelle generally thought anything any white person said about a person of color was racist, so her judgment was not always sound. Still, she pledged to not be scared of holidays or her windows or her neighbors.

Before the betrayal the living room had been a brutal purple trimmed with mango, a color combo found on cheesy velour pimp suits worn by assholes on Halloween. A bunch of lesbians shooting a lesbian film about lesbian relationships had shot a spin-the-bottle scene in the room, paying a full month’s rent in exchange for constant access and the right to paint the space this horrible color combination. Michelle was glad when it was over, but she had come to love the garish new living room.

I think I died in a room like this, Ekundayo had commented darkly on the purple hue. In a past life I mean. Ekundayo was morose. And hot. Her long hair was clumped and woven into braids and dreadlocks, she wore only black leather pants and thick hoodies, the hood pulled up over her head. She brought a long dark stick with her when she left the house, in case anyone fucked with her. She smoked a ton of pot and was paranoid, as well as suffering the stress of having been black and female and queer her whole life. Ekundayo kept to herself, living in the back room off the kitchen. It wasn’t really a bedroom, a large industrial sink hung off one wall. Michelle supposed it had been intended as a sort of washroom. A past tenant had installed a rickety loft, making the back room an exciting place to be during a minor earthquake. Seemingly tacked to the back of the building, the room trembled like a plate of Jell-O, the poorly built loft inside the trembling room trembled separately. It was like carnival ride, the kind assembled by druggie fugitives in parking lots. Ekundayo painted the entirety of her little room black, including the door that closed on the kitchen. She made trance music, sometimes layering her own poetry over the beats — spacey, mystical.

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. It was the color of the sky when the sun refused to come out. It was the color of bathwater when you haven’t cleaned yourself in a long time. It was like a dirty shade pulled down against the world. It was the color of her skin, that morning, after her first run-in with heroin, the greige shade of a drugged-out white person. Michelle hated it and she couldn’t believe her roommates would do such a thing without asking her. She was the primary roommate. She was the one who had found the house seven years ago. Back when it had been crammed full of straight girls. A Trekkie who ate lots of meat, had a violent cat, and did Crowleyian magick, leaving cryptic phrases on the walls in marker. She had left to go back to school and study the Civil War. A girl who belly danced at the Moroccan restaurant on Valencia and also stripped at the peep show in North Beach, who had a Muslim boyfriend who didn’t know she was a stripper, who walked through the house in boxers, burping — every lesbian’s fear of living with a straight woman. When she moved out Michelle took her room, the best room, and found sequins from her costumes embedded in the floorboards. Michelle filled the house with a series of transient queer girls. Lara was a jolly Brit who made giant puppets and sponge-painted her bedroom so it looked like a coffee-house bathroom. She had violent fights with everyone who lived there, so eventually she left. Tia the MC and DJ who brought with her a teenage runaway girlfriend who tied up their phone line and left glass beer bottles in the shower. Ellis from Texas, who Michelle had had such a crush on, but then, seeing her with her back thrown out in bed all the time, stoned on weed, asking housemates to bring her bowls of ramen, the infatuation died. Michael, who had just gotten sober and started meditating and was always mad at everyone for smoking crystal meth in the kitchen. Karen, whose mother paid her rent. Stacy, who was totally on heroin, but, as Michelle hadn’t yet met heroin, she believed the girl was simply on pills when she passed out with an ashtray of lit cigarettes on her belly, on the couch, in front of the television set. Stacy had a psychotic break on speed and, thinking there were miniature policemen shining red lights at her, wound up locked in someone’s closet in a Tenderloin SRO, her parents came from South Carolina and took her to a Christian rehab. Michelle had been there forever. Michelle had moved Stitch in and now Stitch was going to go and paint the living room, defend it, and then freak out at the sight of heroin implements scattered across Michelle’s desk. The truncated pen, the burned-bottomed spoon with a tangy ring of drug stuck to its curve. The little balloon the drugs had come in, one and ones, one bag of dope and another of yellowy cocaine so horrible not even Michelle would do it, both of them twisted up in bits of cellophane from a cigarette-pack wrapper.

What the fuck? Stitch had followed stomping, pouting Michelle down the hall and into her bedroom, to be shocked at the tableau. What are you doing? You’re doing heroin?

I’m Not “Doing It,” Michelle said in a voice that perhaps a teenager would use with its mother, I Did It. Once. And I Didn’t Shoot It. Michelle was annoyed to have her drug intake policed by Stitch, of all people. Stitch, who she had once spied making a purchase from the Coco, Chiva, Outfits man. Stitch, who Michelle had followed home and found fuming on the front steps, having learned the Coco, Chiva, Outfits man had sold her but a crumble of peppermint candy and not an amber nub of chiva. Stitch had tried to convince her to walk back to Sixteenth and Mission and make the Coca, Chiva, Outfits guy give her her money back, which even Michelle, at that naive moment in her urban education, knew was ridiculous. This was who was going to police her drug use? Stitch who had once knocked on Michelle’s door and asked, Hey, will you check on me every so often to make sure I don’t die? Sure, Michelle had said awkwardly, not bothering to ask why her new roommate thought she might die, knowing it had something to do with drugs. Stitch, who had once shot ecstasy in the closet, then fucked her best friend’s girlfriend, then crawled into bed with Michelle to cuddle because the drug had made her cold. You Shot Ecstasy? Michelle had asked, incredulous. Who Shoots Ecstasy? It works faster, Stitch had chattered. How impatient, Michelle had thought. This was the person monitoring her drug ingestion?

Okay fine, fine, I’m sorry, okay? Stitch had her hands in the air like it was a stickup. Michelle, in her foul and sickened mood, decided she would punish Stitch for the rest of the night. Everything was stupid. The heroin, that trickster, had made her feel actual love and then ripped it away, leaving her serotonin at low tide, her stomach nauseous, her pallor unattractive. The teen was a goofball, Michelle was embarrassed at how quickly the simplest person could fascinate her. One pretty feature — and really, who doesn’t have at least one pretty feature? — and she was off, a romantic narrative spinning hay to gold, eking out a nobility, a deep sense of profundity out of your average drunk, fuckup, hasbeen, never-will-be. Michelle saw potential the way a psychic saw auras. It was a gift, in a way. It was like she was some sort of love Buddha. But it was dumb, too. She had blown it with Andy again and she would not go back, not even if Andy would take her, which, Michelle hoped for Andy’s own self-esteem, she would not. What would she do? Hang around and wait for another date to pop up. Get drunk and etc. with Ziggy and Stitch. Work at the bookstore. Fall in love and be all yeah this person is magic, this is the one, yeah! all over again, with no sense of irony, and once again ruin the relationship — somehow, Michelle would figure out how to ruin it. She began to cry into her cocktail, salting the sweetness. Stitch (who was really a true-blue friend, really a tender heart, a sensitive, caretaking Taurus to the core, one who resented astrology and all the fake sciences), came quickly to Michelle and hugged her fiercely.

I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. Listen, we’ll paint it back. We’ll paint it whatever horrible color you want, me and Ekundayo will do it.

No, No. Michelle brushed her away. Stitch’s face was close to hers. It was a thin vegan face, one prematurely aged from dehydration and poor living. No matter how much powdered kelp she sprinkled into her PBR, it didn’t matter. Her skin’s lines were deep for a twenty-three-year-old.

I Don’t Even Care About That, Michelle wept. It’s Everything, Everything. It’s Andy And Our House And The Cockroaches And Love And How Fucking Gentrified The Neighborhood Is Getting And The Dead Earth And My Sick Sad Moms And—

It’s the heroin, Ziggy chimed in, expert. It really is just the heroin. Let it leave your system, you’ll feel better.

Take some niacin, Stitch offered.

The thought of hot flashes on top of all her other sensations sickened Michelle. No, she said, I Have To Get Out Of Here.

Go home and rest, Ziggy suggested.

No I Mean I Have To Get Out Of Here, San Francisco, It’s Fucking Depressing. I Have To Move.

To where? Stitch asked skeptically.

Los Angeles, Michelle said.

Yeah right, her friends said in unison, and looked at each other, startled.

Weird, Ziggy said.

It’s An Omen, said Michelle. It’s A Sign. I’m Moving. I’m Getting Out Of Here Before It’s Too Late.

8

Michelle knew people in Los Angeles. Her friend Fabian had been evicted, moved south, and was now hooked up with some movie company. He had phoned Michelle and asked for a copy of her book. Michelle had sent it along without excitement. Such things happened to books, possibility eddied around them. Michelle knew a couple writers whose books had been optioned for film, but no one whose books had been made into a film. Michelle and her ilk were not the writers whose books became movies. They were the writers who scarcely believed they’d managed to be published at all, who not very long ago were publishing themselves on Xerox machines with stolen Kinko’s cards. They were writers who invaded bookstores to truffle out the shop’s sole copy of their book, then scrawl their autograph on the flyleaf with bleeding Sharpies. They did this not so that a reader could have the delight of an autographed book — no one could be sure such readers existed. They did it to damage the book with their signature and render it nonreturnable. Bookstores can return books that don’t sell, but not if someone draws on its pages, even the author.

Though having your book made into a film was too much to hope for, Michelle and her writer friends did yearn for a fruitless but profitable option. Sometimes a movie company bought up the film rights to bunches of books, stories they’d never in a million years make into movies, just so that some other movie company didn’t get it. The studios optioned the work and let it sit on a shelf and the author collected a check and nothing more ever happened. It sounded like a good deal to Michelle. The movie company would only ruin the book anyway.

Michelle and her kin spoke proudly about how they would never let Hollywood turn their stories into watered-down, homophobic films, the musicians among them chiming in that they would never sign to a major label, never sell out. To feel the heat in these conversations one would imagine mainstream success was beating down their doors, that Starbucks wanted to sponsor their next tour, that Julia Roberts was itching to play the part of a fucked-up alcoholic baby dyke in her next film. In actuality, no one cared what these queer, low-rent San Franciscan artists were doing. No one was paying attention and that was fine. These artists didn’t really fucking care about anyone outside their world, either. They wanted only to continue and survive. Michelle dreamed of a corporation paying her a thousand dollars to ensure her book was never made into a movie. A thousand dollars! Michelle had never been in possession of a thousand dollars.

Fabian emailed her when Michelle’s book arrived in the mail. Thanks, he typed. If you ever write a screenplay let me know. Michelle felt the dread of expectation hit her shoulders. Is that what she would have to do? She’d pulled herself from poetry to memoir in order to have more access to the world around her, would she now have to write movies? It was a terrible thought, like needing a job. Michelle already had a job, the bookstore. Writing was the antijob, the fuck you to all jobs, her claim on her autonomy, what kept her feral and free. To hitch her liberty to a screenplay would be to kill it. She’d become an adult, a worker, a grown-up, no longer a writer, not really.

Screenplays followed prescribed arcs, adhered to formulas that forbid departure on the Tangent of No Return. Tangents were Michelle’s favorite part of writing, each one a declaration of agency: I know I was going over there but now I’m going over here, don’t be so uptight about it, just come along. A tangent was a fuckup, a teenage runaway. It was a road trip with a full tank of gas. You can’t get lost if you don’t have anywhere to be. This was writing for Michelle: rule free, glorious, sprawling. Screenplays were the death of this, and on the offhand suggestion of an acquaintance she now felt a deep pressure to write one. Because she was poor. It wasn’t her fault, she was born into it and it is famously hard to climb out of. But if there was an avenue available to her, even a crapshoot like writing a screenplay, and she didn’t take it and she remained poor for the rest of her life, well then it would be no one’s fault but her own.

Also in Los Angeles was Michelle’s gay brother, Kyle. Like everyone, Michelle had a family, though she didn’t talk about them much. She had written a little bit about them, and the people around her had read what was written and then this weird thing happened. Michelle would be talking about her family and someone would pipe up, Yeah, I read that in your book. And Michelle would get such a tripped-out, postmodern feeling about it. She thought it poor form for the listener to morph from a person or friend into a reader, a voyeur. It made Michelle feel caught, like she’d done something wrong. Perhaps she had, perhaps it was too much to have written the book. Her mothers certainly thought so. Kym had written a full critique of the book and emailed it to Michelle as an attachment, in it her own linguistic prowess was displayed. She used words Michelle did not understand in order to eviscerate the prose, indeed eviscerate was one of the words, it was how Michelle learned it. Kym was the only one of their clan to have gone to college and thus occasionally felt like an intellectually superior underdog. Michelle didn’t understand why, if her mother was so learned, she hadn’t lifted her family out of poverty — wasn’t that the whole point of higher education?

Kym’s just jealous, she always thought she’d write a book of her own, Wendy had soothed Michelle, but Wendy refused to read the book at all. Instead, she would pull it off Kym’s bookshelf, scan a few passages about herself, burst into tears, and phone Kyle to process.

She makes me look so ugly, she’d said to her son. Always smoking. But her mother was always smoking. Michelle felt that if people didn’t like the way they looked in her book then they should have behaved differently. Michelle never tried to make herself look awesome, Michelle strove to portray herself as the fickle, self-righteous martyr she was. If her mother thought chain-smoking was ugly behavior for a lady, she should quit. Michelle didn’t feel great about this hardness but she could see no other way.

I thought she made you look noble, Kyle had comforted his parent. Like a hard worker, a really good worker.

Wendy was a nurse at a state hospital for the insane. This had really compromised Michelle’s adolescent fantasy of being locked up in a sanitarium. Hers would not be the manicured lawns and curving mahogany staircases traversed by wealthy friends sent to McLean in Belmont, the prestigious asylum of Anne Sexton and Girl, Interrupted. No, if Michelle lost her mind it would be off to a state loony bin, horrible places run by hardened New Englanders who looked down on the mentally weak. Get it together, she imagined a caretaker hissing, slamming Michelle’s meds down on her tray. New Englanders were more bitter and resentful than people of other regions. They couldn’t fake it like a Southerner, couldn’t make it passive-aggressive like a Californian.

What the fuck are you? local strangers routinely demanded from teenage Michelle, on buses and trains, in stores and in the street. Her beauty ideal then was hair erupting in a mushroom cloud around her head, bangs obscuring her face like a veil, lips blackened with the gummy Elvira-brand lipstick drugstores sold at Halloween.

You think that looks good? people she’d never met would challenge her. After a while Michelle began to think every cackle in a public place was aimed at her. If a stranger approached with an Excuse me, Michelle responded like she was ready to beat them with sticks. This was PTSD. Michelle was so damaged from it that when she finally arrived in the safety of San Francisco and a kindly ex-hippie looked at her hot-pink ponytail and chirped Nice hair! Michelle turned on the woman with a growling Fuck You! People had said Nice hair! to Michelle all the time in Massachusetts and never, not once, had anyone actually thought her hair was nice.

Teenage Michelle knew that everyone at the state hospital — the doctors, the nurses, the cooks and cleaners, the receptionists, the handymen and lunch ladies — all of them thought the patients were scamming the system, faking crazy so they wouldn’t have to work a day job while they were working their asses off as butlers to the pathologically lazy.

If Michelle were to give in to mental collapse she wanted to be gently caught, fed well, and given restorative craft projects. Her wealthy punk friends got to silk-screen Misfits T-shirts at McLean. At the state hospital there was only a television bolted to the rec-room wall, some board games with pieces missing, plastic furniture dotted with charred holes where patients nodded out on their meds while smoking. The room felt like the setting for a gang rape. Teenage Michelle kept it together.

The people who’d read Michelle’s book, who knew about her mothers and interrupted to tell her so when she spoke of them, made Michelle clam up in hot embarrassment. They deprived her of that basic human pleasure: sharing your story. The shame she felt! Like when you’re telling an anecdote and someone interjects—Yeah, you already told us that story. Oh, no — you are repeating yourself, you cannot stop talking, you are so checked out you cannot remember what you have said to whom, you are so self-involved. To hear a person say Yeah, I read that in your book is this shame times twenty. You so cannot stop talking that you actually wrote down your talk and then expected others to read it, and not even that will exorcize your narratives, you will in fact continue to talk and talk, expecting us to pretend we don’t know the story, which you have performed into actual microphones in public places. Guess what, Michelle? We know your mother is a chain-smoking lesbian psych nurse. Everyone does.

Michelle didn’t know how to rectify the situation. She supposed it was simply a consequence of her writing and she would have to man up to it.

So she spoke little of her family, but she had one. Two mothers, one a disabled intellectual and one an underearning caretaker of the crazy. Wendy could have gone back to school and upgraded her degree but she preferred to stay where she was and judge those with more success. Michelle was just like her, they both enjoyed scorning those who had taken steps to better their lives. Wendy felt she was too old to go back to school and Michelle understood, at twenty-seven she was also too old to attempt college. Too aged, too proud, too broke, and too hapless. They had selected their paths, Michelle and Wendy and Kym, and there was nothing to do but continue the trudge forward and see what happened.

After Kym got sick, Wendy got depressed, and the moms had been frozen in this configuration for about twenty years. The last time I had an orgasm was when I was conceiving you, Wendy overshared. And Kym only did it because we knew it helped my chances of conceiving and the sperm had been so expensive. Horrifed, Michelle urged her mother toward basic masturbation.

Do You Have A Vibrator? she cried into the phone. Do You Want Me To Get You One?

No, where would I get a vibrator, you think I go to the Combat Zone? I don’t want you going into those places either, you’ll get raped.

How, Michelle marveled, were her mothers lesbians? They were totally ignorant of feminist sex shops. They were lesbian townies.

There Is A Woman-Owned Sex Shop In JP! Michelle said. She could imagine her mother gesticulating a no way gesture, a wave of hand, a stink face, and a shrug.

That place is for college students, Wendy said.

Well, You Don’t Need A Vibrator To Have An Orgasm, Michelle counseled.

The conversation was creepy, a sort of reverse incest that left Michelle feeling like she’d been inappropriate with her mom. Now the woman would never be able to masturbate without thinking about her daughter wielding a vibrator and interrogating her.

Wendy had carried Michelle, pregnant with sperm from a sperm bank, and Kym had carried Kyle with sperm from a penis that had actually been inside of her. They’d chosen the old-fashioned way because the likelihood of impregnation was higher, the risk of complications lower, and it was free. Kym and Wendy did not have a lot of money and they were offended, as lesbians, to be forced to pay for something straight women received gratis, something men spilled on the ground all day long. The donor had been an old community college acquaintance of Kym’s. They’d selected him because he was smart and good-looking, and if he was a bit of a pompous jerk, well, that surely was not genetic, that was cultural, a man raised in a man’s world, they weren’t going to find a handsome, intelligent man who wasn’t arrogant, they let it slide. Kym got pregnant right away, but they kept at it for another week or so, just in case. Out came Kyle. He looked exactly like his dad, only gay.

Thank god you’re gay, Wendy would say. Both of you, and I would have loved you both no matter what, we had no idea we’d be lucky enough to have two gay kids, but you, Kyle, I thank god. You look so much like that donor, but then you look so gay, it breaks it up.

“That donor”? Do you mean my father? Kyle liked to dig. But he did look gay. He was tinier than Michelle, with impressive, compact muscles he did absolutely nothing to earn. Living in Los Angeles, Kyle spent most of his days on his ass in his car eating Del Taco and Burger King. The poison California sun had blonded his hair, which he kept in a stylish, gay haircut. His clothes were skintight and he swished. He had that excellent and scary gay-boy humor, a sharp, searing wit honed in the busted part of New England where they’d grown up. He’d gotten fucked with a lot. The same boys who messed with him in the street later sought out complicated scenarios in which blow jobs could occur. It had germinated in Kyle an affection for rough trade, for macho, bicurious straight dudes, self-loathing faggoty thugs, and Craigslist DL hookups.

It would be sweet to be close to Kyle again. Of course she would have to hide her drug use, even some of her drinking, her brother was bizarrely innocent about such things for a gay man. But Michelle was thinking that in Los Angeles she would lay off the drugs. Her drinking would also slow down. She would become healthier away from mossy, soggy San Francisco. Kyle hated San Francisco. He thought the gays there had no ambition, they wanted only to fall into an infantile orgy of suckling and self-obsession, constantly trolling for hookups and making a big rainbow deal about how gay they were. In Los Angeles Kyle was out because he couldn’t not be, he was such a sissy, but it was no big whoop. San Francisco was so retro like that. Kyle was postgay and, like his mothers, a bit of a townie. He was an assistant to one of the most powerful casting directors in Hollywood, a famously psychotic bitch. It was Kyle’s dream job, he felt like Joan Crawford’s personal assistant. When his boss hurled an ashtray in his general direction, he let it smash upon the wall, raised a waxed eyebrow, and made a brilliant deadpan comment. Kyle felt his purpose in life was to be witty, to perform capability with flair and style, like a secretary in a 1950s movie. To be the secret backbone of the more accomplished yet unstable figurehead, privy to the private breakdowns, the one handy with a glass of Scotch and a touch of tough love. The one, Kyle hoped, to inherit the business, to feature prominently in the will when the woman keeled over young from a stress-induced heart attack.

Kyle, too, had previously suggested Michelle move to Los Angeles and write a television pilot, but Michelle had resisted. She did not want to write television pilots, she wanted to write another memoir, something that was feeling harder to do. At twenty-seven, Michelle had already covered the bulk of her life in her one published book. She recalled Andy pulling away in her fabulous car, hollering out the window, Don’t you ever fucking write about me! Michelle was haunted by the thought that the work she did, her art, brought pain to other people. People she cared about, whom she’d been close to. Her mothers were bummed. Kyle was uneasy, though he did his best to be supportive. Now Andy was resentful in advance. Michelle’s bravado — don’t act that way if you don’t like to see it in print — was wearing thin. It seemed to require a certain ugliness to maintain it. She’d grown weary of herself. Perhaps she would try something new. Could she write about herself without mentioning any other people? That seemed impossible. She could fictionalize things but this ruined the point of memoir, frustrated the drive to document, to push life in through your eyes and out your fingers, the joy of describing the known, the motion of the book ready-made. It had happened! It was life! Her job was to make it beautiful or sad or horrifying, to splash around in language till she rendered it perfect. Perfect for that moment.

Michelle didn’t believe in perfection, in writing or anything else. Belief in perfection was a delusion that spawned mental illness. But she could capture the essence of a moment, the moment her mind conjured the words to document the scene — yes. This was writing to Michelle, but it was no longer allowed. Poor her! She would have to write fiction — real, actual fiction. She would have to write a screenplay. She didn’t want everyone hating her forever and she didn’t want to be a loser. She would have to move to Los Angeles.

9

Kyle was thrilled that Michelle was finally moving to Los Angeles. In two phone calls he secured for his sister a studio apartment in Hollywood. The studio was $400.

I’m so glad you’re not going to hang out in San Francisco forever, waiting to get evicted, Kyle clucked. News of the city’s dot-com upset was leaking out of San Francisco and into the nation. Rents in San Francisco were now officially more expensive than in Manhattan. People were charging $2,000 to sleep in a closet. High-paid Silicon Valley execs were spending the night riding buses, unable to find a vacant apartment. Strippers were coming from all over the country to dance in Bay Area strip clubs, collecting big tips from Internet nerds. The city was coming apart.

But Michelle had paid only $200 to live in her shab-by-chic room. And she was in no danger of being evicted. Her landlord lived right downstairs, a sad widower named Clovis who gave the household platters of supermarket cookies at Christmas. Michelle had learned that before the straight girls had occupied it, the flat had been a haven for fucked-up, dysfunctional lesbians. Ekundayo’s room had been a practice space for Tribe 8, the dyke punk band that performed topless and pulled dildos from their pants, goaded men from the crowd to fellate them, and then castrated themselves and flung the silicone into the audience. Man-hating lesbians who couldn’t cope with reality had lived there, pulling traveler’s-check scams, faking insanity to get on SSI. Roommates had pooled lists of ex-boyfriends and hustled them out of money for nonexistent abortions.

When she moved in, Michelle had had no idea that the house had been a magic castle of queerness with a secret outlaw history. It was as if the Dillinger Gang had hidden out there. A lesbian porn had been filmed in her bathroom! An infamous lesbian hooker had once lived in her bedroom, had nailed hardware into her floorboards to tie down her lovers! Michelle had restored the flat to its former glory, all rooms occupied with barely functioning lesbian alcoholics. And now she would leave.

But Michelle loved her bedroom. The floors were blue and the wall behind her lousy futon was also blue, and stuck with chunky glitter. Three windows looked out on the street below, where a stolen car ring operated out of a garage. The dismantled alarms wailed all night, but Michelle was used to it. Gauzy thrift-store curtains hung in the windows, tied back with Mylar ribbons. A giant bullhorn mounted on a piece of rotting wood dangled in the center window. Michelle had found it on the street, the source of so many unexpected treasures. The ocean of poverty pulled many gifts to shore. Stolen luggage was often gutted on the sidewalk, and Michelle was not above rummaging the contents. She’d found velvety platform shoes, satiny gowns, chipped knickknacks. It was okay that she didn’t have money to shop ever because the streets provided her with such hunter-gatherer thrills.

Michelle had loved her room so long, had lived inside it seven years, and now could feel herself being pushed out from it. It wasn’t the economy. Clovis the Landlord had promised he would not raise the rent and he had no intention of selling the house. The man spent his lonely nights singing into his personal karaoke machine in the flat downstairs. The sound of him singing Sammy Davis Jr., his warbling voice floating up through the floorboards, broke everyone’s heart. Everyone in the punk house loved their landlord. It was okay that the shower, a metal closet, was rusting through the bottom, surely harboring gangrene and soaking the house in soggy rot — Clovis’s second-floor apartment was in no better shape. If he had the money he’d fix their shower, but to get the money he would have to raise their rent, and so they put a milk crate in the shower to stand above the jagged rust and wore flip-flops while they bathed, just in case.

When the word got out that Michelle was moving everyone assumed she was getting evicted. When she told them she was not, she was just vacating her $200-a-month room in the Mission by choice, everyone was baffled. Why would anyone do such a thing? To move to Los Angeles, that shit hole? Hers was surely the last room in town renting for under $800. Once she left the Bay Area she could never come back. She could never afford it. She was evicting herself, it was crazy. But the city had bad vibes and they’d infected her. Michelle hardly ever saw the sun anymore, sleeping until her evening shift at the bookstore loomed. Her boss had asked her if she had lost weight or if she had just started to wear tighter clothes. The answer was both. Michelle was beginning to look like a Ramone. At night she began to dream that her room was haunted and the spirits wanted her dead. She had gone as far as she could in San Francisco. She would move to Los Angeles and write screenplays.

10

A problem with Michelle’s plan to move to Los Angeles was that technically she did not drive. She’d been taught, briefly, years ago, by an old girlfriend and she hadn’t felt incompetent. She’d enjoyed tooling around in the car under supervision, getting praised for how well she drove. She’d intended to make it legal, go to the DMV and get a license, but Michelle was so lazy and there were always other things to do, like drink and sleep and go to the bookstore. The DMV was in the Panhandle, wherever that was. Michelle didn’t really leave the Mission. In a burst of can-do responsibility, she figured out the bus route to the office and arrived early one morning, prepared to spend the afternoon. But the woman at the counter turned her away quickly.

No more, she shook her head. No more driver’s licenses.

What? Michelle had expected bureaucracy, hassles, annoyances — it was the DMV. A person didn’t have to drive to know that — but she hadn’t anticipated this.

No more licenses till 2000. January and July there will be a lottery if you want to enter your name.

You Stopped Giving Driver’s Licenses? Since When?

January this year. The lady was bored.

How Was I Supposed To Know That? Michelle felt outraged. Driving was a right, right? So she put it off for about a decade, so what? It was still her right, wasn’t it?

It was in the news. The woman spoke to Michelle as if she were a dummy. It went into effect in San Francisco on January first, and in the state of California last month. No new driver’s licenses. Not enough gas, you know?

The woman looked tired. She was Latina, her hair was in a claw at the nape of her neck, she wore gold hoop earrings and a little cross on her clavicle. I’m lucky to still be here, they laid off half the office. It was creepily quiet. A few people were renewing their licenses. Outside the windows was a patch of barren soil. The natives had died and the landscapers had tugged out all the invasive species and so there was just dirt.

Michelle left. She didn’t take the bus, she walked. The Panhandle, the long park that ran into the frying pan of Golden Gate Park, was lined with trees in various death states. Some had been eaten from the inside out by invading beetles and some of those had been burned to stumps in an attempt to stop the outbreak. Some were starved of water by the drought and some of those were so shriveled they had toppled over and smashed like plaster. Others were strangled by kudzu and Michelle at least appreciated the green gloss of their leaves. She hurried back to the Mission, which never had much wildlife in the first place and so was not as depressing as these doomed, once-green neighborhoods.

Did You Know This? Michelle was outraged. This Thing With There Being No More Driver’s Licenses?

Ziggy nodded. Yeah, everyone knows that.

How Did I Not Know?

I don’t know, you don’t watch the news or anything, read papers?

Michelle didn’t. When she watched TV it was to view marathons of Unsolved Mysteries and when she read the paper it was for the horoscope and sex-advice columns.

Is There Really No Gas?

I mean, not a lot. Ziggy shrugged. They were sitting on the stoop on the side of the queer bar, smoking. They had smuggled their pint glasses of beer out with them and if the dyke who owned the bar, who was their friend, caught them she would tell them that they were compromising her liquor license and make them feel guilty, like they were bad friends. They kept the beer low, sneaking glugs behind their army bags. It was too much to expect people not to smoke and drink at the same time. It was almost cruel. Michelle imagined it was like the mythical blue-balls syndrome men experience. To have the compulsive glow of a wonderful buzz and not be able to eat half a pack of cigarettes while quenching your smoke-parched throat with beer? It was inhuman. No smoking in bars, no more driver’s licenses.

The World Is Ending, Michelle said grimly.

You know how to drive, who cares? Ziggy said.

I Can’t Rent A Truck, she said, Without A License. I Can’t Rent A Car Or A U-Haul Or Anything.

Ziggy sighed deeply, took an even deeper pull of her squishy cigarette, and sighed out all the smoke. Look, you want the van, just ask for it. Take it. You’d be doing me a favor.

What? Michelle yelped, surprised. Did You Think I Was Being, What, Passive Aggressive? I Don’t Want The Van! I’m Just Complaining About My Life!

Really, you’d be doing me a favor. There are so many tickets on it, next time I get one they’re going to tow it. And if I don’t start paying them off they’re going to boot it. And it won’t pass smog. It’s doomed. Just take it.

Are You Serious?

Yeah. You can drive a van?

Yes! Michelle cheered, having no idea whether or not she could drive a van. Oh My God! She flung herself at her friend in a fat hug, knocking over her drink, sending beer everywhere and the pint glass rolling into the gutter.

You guys! Their friend the bar owner came over, grabbing the glass from the street. That’s it! Really! You guys can’t drink here anymore!

Michelle stood abruptly, knocking over her own.

Really, their friend the bar owner said. She was not an unkind person. She was deeply disappointed in Michelle and Ziggy. She had given them many opportunities to change their behaviors and they refused to be different.

Sorry, they mumbled in sheepish, busted unison and shuffled off to the Albion, where somehow you were permitted to smoke inside despite the ordinance and where cocaine was freely for sale despite the illegality. It was where they belonged, anyway.

Ziggy dumped the van on Michelle the very next day.

But I’m Not Leaving For A Month, she protested.

You want it, take it now or else I’m torching it.

Ziggy had once made a little bit of money helping some skaters she drank with torch their car for insurance money. According to the poem she wrote about it, in which she compares the flaming hunk to the burning, ruined earth, it was an awe-inspiring experience.

It was awkward for Michelle, driving the van around the Mission. It was enormous and it shuddered. The plastic case that locked over the engine, the doghouse, grew so hot that Michelle’s foot burned. Her blind spot was too big. It was a relic, people gave her dirty looks when she drove it, which was not often. Mostly just from parking space to parking space as she waited for the day she would leave the city.

Michelle was withdrawing from her life in preparation for the strange pain of leaving. She slacked off at the bookstore, not even pretending to work, just openly reading magazines or talking to Kyle on the phone long distance. She was pulling away from Ziggy and Stitch, staying in her room when she heard Stitch making smoothies in the kitchen, not coming out until she heard her friend tromp down the stairs. Mostly she stayed in her room anyway, sleeping off whatever she had done the night before. (Increasingly, this was heroin with strangers.)

Michelle had a few rules about the heroin to keep her safe from the worst-case scenarios everyone knew so well. Never shoot it, duh. Take one day off in between, at least! Never do it alone. That would be extremely addict-y. And why would she want to? The best part of the drug was bonding with another person about what clandestine idiot badasses you were. To have your clandestine idiotic badassery witnessed by another. To have bad-kid bonding and to have sex all doped up on a dirty fluid that gave each coupling the illusion of love.

It was surprisingly easy to find people to do heroin with her. After Stitch told Ziggy, Ziggy told Linda, and her old crush showed up at her house. People always showed up at Michelle’s house. Despite the violence of their neighborhood the door was rarely locked. Michelle had once come home to a party in her living room, lines of cocaine on the table, and a Kenneth Anger video in the busted VCR. No one who actually lived in the house was there. The house had ceased being a home and had become a sort of bar, a public space where anyone could show up and get a drink.

No, Michelle said to Linda, who had come for heroin. You’ll Get Addicted.

No I won’t, Linda said, sounding unconvinced. And even if I did it wouldn’t be your fault.

Michelle didn’t believe this. It would totally be her fault if she gave Linda heroin and the girl got strung out. Was this the kind of influence she wanted to have on the people in her life? It was a question of karma, which was complicated, subtle, and real. And anyway, she just didn’t want to see Linda become a heroin addict. But she would.

Another person Michelle turned on to the drug was an androgynous person she’d spotted at the Albion. Michelle couldn’t tell if the person was a boy or a girl or someone born male who was dressed like a girl or a dyke who was somewhat transgender or what. All Michelle knew was that the person was tall, like almost six feet, with a sweet, hard face and strange, smudgy makeup and odd leather clothes from the thrift store. The lipstick on their face was too dark. It was an interesting look, sort of Lou Reed circa Rock ’n’ Roll Animal, only taller, and a girl. Right?

You Look Like Lou Reed, Michelle told the being, who took that as a compliment. Michelle was perfect, she was perfect inside, she had the perfect balance of beer and also vodka plus some of Fernando’s stash and she felt loose and daring, she could talk, she could talk to anyone, she could talk to this person who she was thinking of as a being, whose gender, come to think of it, she had no desire to know, why should she care, this person’s gender was Lou Reed. All she needed to know was: A. Does the being like girls of Michelle’s particular sloppy, down-on-her-luck femininity? and B. Did the being want to do heroin?

My name is Quinn, said the being, and Michelle almost smacked her hand to her forehead, it was just too much, it was too perfect. Quinn was like a noun that meant Androgyny, Lou Reed, Drugs. It was a synonym for New York City, 1983, red leather. Quinn had blocky black glasses on their face and a rattail snaking down the back of their neck.

I’m Michelle, said Michelle. I Don’t Even Want To Know What Your Gender Is, Okay? Don’t Tell Me. It’s Just Lou Reed, All Right?

Quinn nodded, excited. You mean you really don’t know?

I Don’t!

That’s pretty cool, Quinn said, and a slight shyness came about them like a vapor.

I’ll Pay For The Heroin But You Have To Buy It, Michelle instructed. I’ll Show You Where, I’ll Show You Who.

What do I say? How do I ask for it? The being seemed delighted by this turn of events. Michelle could tell they’d be a true adventurer.

I’ll Tell You Everything, Michelle said. She left with the being, not even bothering to say goodbye to Ziggy or Stitch.

At home at her desk Michelle chopped pens and dribbled water into a spoon and played PJ Harvey on her boom box. The being watched with muted interest, inhaled the liquid obediently, and followed Michelle to her futon. They had an intelligent face, something Virginia Woolf — ish about it, perhaps in the nose.

You know, they said, I met Lou Reed once and he told me I looked like a poet. So that’s so weird that you said that.

It’s Weird, Michelle said, And It’s Not. She was high enough to be in the space where all things are so deeply one, so nothing was really a surprise. And You Are A Poet, Right?

Of course, said Quinn.

Of Course. Michelle would have nodded if she could have moved her head, which was perfectly sunken into a perfect pillow. Of course Quinn was a poet, wrote by hand in a notebook forever tucked into a messenger bag, had the sort of literary vibrations Lou Reed would pick out of the air on a New York City street. Michelle felt proud of herself. Whatever Lou had seen in the being, she’d seen too. They shared a certain wavelength.

Why doesn’t everyone do it this way? Quinn asked, blissed out on their back on Michelle’s futon. Why even shoot it, this is so perfect, you couldn’t get it more perfect than this.

I Know, Michelle breathed. It seemed so desperate to shoot it, sort of American. Greedy. Vulgar. This way, you simply breathed. You inhaled water, like a mermaid. Michelle rolled over in such a way that if the being found her alluring it would be easy to take advantage of her.

I’m seeing things, Quinn said, their eyes gently shut. The poet’s face looked chiseled from a fine European marble. The eyes gently rolled the eyelids.

What, What? begged Michelle, who believed drugs were holy, connected you to the divine. This belief fell apart if you traced the drugs’ route to her bedroom — from poverty-stricken people to violent, bloody-handed drug lords, up the butts of people desperate enough to shove drugs up their butt and risk prison for the money, into the hands of more desperate or ruthless people here in her own country, finally making it into the streets of her city, cut with who knows what chemicals, sold by individuals trapped in the throes of their own addictions, individuals who had an arm, a leg, a chunk of their ass eaten away with abscesses and various flesh-eating bacteria. No matter! In the hands of lesser people drugs were a menace, but Michelle was a lover, a spiritual seeker. The drug’s moody wave washed over her as Quinn detailed their gentle hallucinations — violet, flashes of color.

It’s you, Quinn explained to Michelle, You are the violet. This delighted Michelle, who felt crucially seen for the first time in her life. Not seen by dates who’d known she was cute or liked her writing, or by girlfriends who saw her lack of fidelity, her shallowness, her mania. Seen by a stranger whose drug-addled mind beheld her mystical reality. She was violet! She always knew she was special. The drug dropped her down a well of deep love for this genderless, many-gendered being, this Quinn.

Who Are You? she asked. How Come I’ve Never Seen You Before?

I’m married, said the being. I don’t come out much. I stay inside watching The X-Files with my husband.

You’re Married To A Man? Michelle asked, and Quinn nodded before realizing she had revealed her gender.

Oh! she cried, and brought a hand up to her face weakly. Her hands were carved from ivory tusks, glorious animals had died so that Quinn could have those hands, elegantly enormous, veined like cocks, slender and powerful and promising of thrall.

Fearing that the being would lie there blissing out on her violet visions forever, Michelle completed her roll, butting up against Quinn like an animal brought to shore by a persistent current. She brought her lips over and Quinn kissed her back and it was soft soft soft like a dreamtime enchanted forest and they were two children dropped down into a fairy ring. Oh my god, Michelle thought, I think we’re making love. It was a term everyone barfed at. No one wanted to make love, people wanted to fuck, to rake each other’s skin apart with knives and pin it back together with needles. But the tenderness thrilled Michelle and she reconsidered the phrase: making love. It so repulsed Stitch that when forced to she used the abbreviated ML. But Michelle loved love. Heroin was love, the generic of love, what you got if you couldn’t afford the original. The approximation was fine by Michelle. It was a wonderful mimic. Michelle and this being were in love and when they brought their bodies together they made even more love. It was pretty awesome. And then Quinn took the formidable length of her body and used it to subdue Michelle, easily, for Michelle was such a shrimp and so deliciously weakened by the drug. Powerless beneath her lover’s crushing physique she struggled lightly, enough to rouse the being, who stilled her with her jaw like a mother cat hushing a kitten. Michelle’s wiggles calmed and from her mouth came teasing, doped-up whimpers. The being slid her hand deftly into Michelle’s underwear and asked, You like to get fucked, huh? and it was on.

11

Then the van got stolen. There was a dizzying minute when Michelle spun around the empty parking spot, discombobulated. She’d moved it, hadn’t she? She had left it right there, yes, yes. She reeled, looking at the landmarks. Near the free clinic where she had gotten her most recent HIV test. Near the discount grocery store with the intense lighting, where that food riot had happened a few months ago. Right there. And it wasn’t. It wasn’t there. Michelle stood hapless and blinking, waiting for it to tool around the corner, a cartoon van with winking eyes where its headlights should be. Just kidding! It would honk its weak little honk. That didn’t happen.

The sun skulked lower in the sky, then lower still. The bastard sun had shone upon the thievery, done nothing to stop it. Stolen in broad daylight! The insult of it. As if she had been doubly tricked, as if she should have been able to stop it simply because she had been awake. But Michelle had been at work, at the bookstore. Hanging out in the Self-Help section. She liked to read books about alcoholism and personality disorders to assure herself that neither was a problem in her life. When she finished pretending to organize Self-Help she moved over to New Age and consoled herself with astrology books. Aquarians weren’t really prone to addiction, that was more Scorpio’s jam. Sagittarians could also get out of hand, Cuidado, Ziggy! Michelle felt better already.

That afternoon Michelle walked sadly through the Mission. The day’s smog was a thin gas in the air, growing weaker with the sun’s disappearance. There was that smell in the air all the time, the tinny stink of environmental collapse. The fog clung to Michelle’s glasses and wouldn’t come off, her view of life perpetually smeared. She decided to get sushi. We Be was empty, she sat in the window and gazed out the mucky glass. What will I do? Michelle thought. Police report. She remembered when carrots were more plentiful, how they would be gratis in a little glass cup on the tables. Michelle didn’t care about vegetables but missed the orange cheer of them. The walls of the sushi restaurant were marked with broad Xs over fish that had gone extinct. Michelle ordered a cucumber roll and a bowl of rice.

Okay, a police report. Then what? Rent a moving truck. But Michelle couldn’t get a moving truck, she didn’t have a driver’s license. Or, she realized, a credit card. Did you need a credit card? Michelle had a debit card from the credit union. It only worked at the ATM machine at the co-op grocery store. Maybe Michelle wasn’t equipped for life outside her immediate vicinity. Too Bad, she told herself darkly. Her room was already rented out, she’d been swiftly replaced. Ekundayo couldn’t wait for her to leave, and Stitch — Stitch was hurt by Michelle’s move. She felt abandoned. She wasn’t going to beg Michelle to stay in their rotting home, notching off the days with knife marks in their arms. Fine, go, see if I care. It had been Stitch who had sourced Michelle’s replacement. A girl from Olympia, Washington. Olympia still had living trees, why would this girl come to busted San Francisco? Michelle thought scornfully. But she was leaving for Los Angeles. You can’t let the apocalypse rule your life.

Michelle would find someone to drive her to Los Angeles. Maybe her new friend, Quinn. Could Quinn get permission from her husband to go on a road trip with her lesbian, heroin-snorting new friend? That’s not what I am, Michelle scolded herself.

Once in Los Angeles Michelle would have no car. She thought about this and gave an internal shrug. So what, she’d be another carless loser in Los Angeles. Michelle was used to being various sorts of losers. You weren’t a loser if you didn’t drive in San Francisco, though. You were sort of a hero. Even more so if you biked, which Michelle didn’t. She tried to once, when an ex had given her an old mountain bike, and within five days she had almost been run over by a fire truck and had wiped out hugely on the corner of Sixteenth and Mission, directly in front of the bus shelter, trying to drink coffee and ride at the same time. She’d been wearing a plaid skirt that had once belonged to a Catholic schoolgirl when she bailed. Her knees were raw and everyone at the bus stop just stared. Michelle had laughed grandly, to make them feel more comfortable with her accident, but they all just continued to stare.

Michelle would not be riding any bikes in Los Angeles but she’d figure it out. She loved taking buses and trains, it gave her time to read books. Everything was going to be just fine, Michelle assured herself, as her sushi was delivered.

12

Some mornings later the doorbell rang at Michelle’s house. The noise of it gave her bad flashbacks of the days of Andy loitering outside her house, leaning against her amazing car, her tattooed arms folded protectively around her heart, looking at Michelle with kill eyes. No one ever rang the bell at Michelle’s house. Cautiously, Michelle edged to the window. She was hungover but not too bad — her body was becoming accustomed to the heroin, her mornings weren’t ruined with the residual poison, she had learned to metabolize it. She was proud of her mysterious body and its strange wisdoms, its hardiness and strength. Was there nothing she couldn’t endure?

She slid up to the windows, concerned about her nudity. The gauzy curtains hid nothing from the street, they were but decorative pink ponytails framing the face of her bedroom. She edged against the wall and craned her head toward the glass. A cop car was double parked outside, taking up space with an air of entitlement, its angle on the street jaunty, careless.

It’s The Police! Michelle gasped, terrified. What had she done? Michelle looked at her desk. Small and rickety and scarred with chipped black paint, it held the remains of last night’s indulgence. The spoon and the lighter and the gutted ballpoint pen. The yellowy bag of cocaine that came with one and ones, the worst cocaine you had ever seen. For a while she’d been snorting it, hoping it would take the nauseous edge off her high, but now that her tolerance had improved she didn’t really need it. It sat there, packaged inside a twisted shred of Saran Wrap. Evidence.

Hey, Lou Reed, Michelle poked at Quinn’s broad shoulder. Quinn had shoulders like a football player. Michelle’s poke did little to disturb her. Quinn seemed like a giant in Michelle’s bed, a whale beached upon her futon. A lovely beluga, long and white. Tall people were sort of alien to Michelle, whose growth was likely stunted by her time spent in Wendy’s smoky womb. How had this strange creature landed in Michelle’s bed? Surely it was the ocean. Michelle’s sinuses felt waterlogged from kissing her. She was proud of how little she cared if they were girlfriends or not. The part of her heart that usually roiled with longing had been sated by the heroin. Michelle felt more functional for it.

Quinn’s eyes cracked open as Michelle nudged her in the gut with the heel of her foot. Hey, Quinn, Would You Please Answer The Door? Michelle asked, running her hands anxiously over her nakedness. It’s The Cops. I’ll Hide The Drugs.

Quinn watched Michelle open a desk drawer stuffed with flyers for long-ago poetry readings and black-and-white strips of photo-booth pictures. With a sweep of her hand she knocked the drugs, the spoon, and the chopped-up pens, the lighter and the wrappers, into the drawer and banged it shut it with the side of her hip, mumbling a rising chant of alarm. The doorbell honked again.

Get It! Michelle cried, anxious. Please! Quinn sat up in bed, her rarely seen giant breasts exposed to the day. She felt around Michelle’s bedding for her T-shirt. It was a magic T-shirt — when she put it on, her breasts disappeared. Quinn wondered how many times this week she had purchased their drugs in full sight of the cameras the city had mounted on street lights to dissuade drug dealing. They’d been hard for Quinn to take seriously — was there really someone somewhere eating donuts in front of a screen, watching it all go down? No way. But what if she was wrong?

Um, I’d rather you answer it, Quinn said, thinking, Who is this bitch? First Michelle made her buy the heroin, so as to not risk this “reputation” she thought she had. Quinn had a hard time saying no — like most females, she was codependent — so she approached the dealers and made the purchase, and surely it helped that she looked like a guy, even a weird one. If Michelle made the purchase in her teeter-totter heels and the slip she was failing to pass off as a dress, it was possible that the dealer might harass her and Michelle would not roll with it, she would get into a scream-fight with the dealer, she would whap him with her heavy plastic purse, who knows what would happen. So, fine, Quinn bought the drugs, but fuck if she was going to answer the door to Michelle’s house, this person who — let’s be real — was still a stranger to her.

Quinn was proud of herself for this rational and self-protective train of thought. It quelled her fears that her life was out of control. The doorbell shrilled the air around them.

Oh! Michelle yelped, suddenly lucid. It Could Be About The Van! She pulled a pair of black skinny jeans from the floor and wrestled on a clingy long-sleeved shirt that made her skin look like a rattlesnake’s. She slapped her bare feet down the front staircase. She was suddenly grateful for the cops’ diligence, doggedly ringing the bell, ringing the bell. She flung the door open with a swoosh that scattered the nest of junk mail padding the landing. Grocery store circulars, a local BDSM group’s social calendar, and a postcard announcing Ani DiFranco’s upcoming tour dates washed up around her ankles.

Are you Michelle Le-Dus-ki? the cop carefully sounded the syllables.

Yes! Michelle cried. Did You Find My Van? He had found her van. It had been abandoned in a bus zone across from UCSF Medical Center. Let Me Get — Someone, Michelle spluttered, and dashed back up the stairs. They Found The Van They Found The Van They Found The Van! Michelle danced around the room. Quinn felt saturated with relief, a relief that swept through her body like drugs. That was scary. Maybe she would stop being such a miscreant. For years she had been happy with a bottle of wine and whatever pills she could bum off friends with bad backs and anxiety disorders. But she wondered if she could be happy with such chemicals now that she’d seen the bliss abyss.

Michelle and Quinn left the bedroom, moved past the trash pile and down the stairs. A gigantic heap of garbage sat at the very top of Michelle’s staircase, where feng shui tradition suggested you place an altar to welcome guests and purify outside energies. It had been accumulating there for nearly a year. At first it had been a couple items too cumbersome to place into the trash cans, objects waiting to be left by the curb on Big Trash Night. But no one knew when Big Trash Night was scheduled and no one took up the task of finding out, and so the junk lingered, was joined by more junk, growing until it looked like an art installation, a pyramid of bulging, shiny trash bags, alien pods cocooning new life. In a perverse way Michelle supposed it was a feng shui altar for their era. If nature had mostly been replaced by garbage than wouldn’t a “natural” altar be sort of phony, nostalgic even? The trash pile evoked the shores of Ocean Beach, where the tide brought industrial wreckage on the sand with the blind generosity of a pet cat leaving a kill on your pillow. The ocean wanted only to give and had been wrecked of its ability to bring anything but regurgitated garbage. Michelle thought everyone should live with a giant trash heap in their homes. They deserved it.

Quinn gave a short glance at the cop and felt her empty belly rumble with hunger and dread. She’d thrown up some pizza last night after the drugs had hit her, that was the hunger. The dread was, well, the cop was bound to mistake her for a boy. Quinn would either have to correct his mistake or sit there, anxiously waiting for the dude to figure it out. The anticipation would be agonizing. If the cop caught his blunder he’d feel played and betrayed and it would be left to Quinn to comfort him. The cop would resent Quinn for being so gender ambiguous — it wasn’t his fault, anyone would mistake her for a man, look at her, why does she look like that if she doesn’t want to be a man anyway, this fucking city, I’m getting transferred to Vallejo.

Quinn’s gender confusion studded each day with potential land mines. Who knew what would happen? Public bathrooms were famously traumatizing, even in San Francisco. Queers stuck to their bubbles for a reason, the outside world was hostile. But the cop hadn’t paid her much attention since the initial bro-down head-nod. Quinn was passing. She settled into a morning of maleness.

Without even looking at Quinn, Michelle knew what was happening. Like all females Michelle was codependent, but in femmes codependency could become so sharp, so intense, that it reached psychic proportions. She could feel the atmospheric conditions that produced a gender meltdown, the currents spun her like a weather vane. She hoped her normative gender could somehow smooth the spiky vibrations. She would fill the small space of the squad car with classic female cheer. She would twinkle like a little star. A little, scrawny, strung-out rattlesnake star.

Michelle wished the public understood the extent gender deviation was punished in their culture. Her wish was naive, Aquarian — who did she think was punishing gender deviation, if not the public? Still, she dreamed of a Black Like Me experiment, something like the MTV show that put a bunch of skinny morons in fat suits and sent them out into the world to cry. People are so mean to fat people! was the tearful conclusion. Michelle loved reality shows that punked the ignorant into feeling compassion. It affirmed her belief that humanity was inherently kind. It just sometimes took a production crew and public humiliation to shock the heart into opening. She wondered if there was a way to enlighten the people to the struggle of her friends. Maybe if they shopped more they’d be more relatable, but you need money to shop and you need jobs for money and it was hard to get a job when people didn’t know what gender you were, hence the need for an illuminating television show. Michelle sighed. Maybe she would find meaningful work in Los Angeles after all.

So, there’s some blood on the passenger seat, the cop announced as the police cruiser rolled out of the Mission. Michelle had had her face pressed to the glass of the cop car, dying to see someone she knew. How hilarious would that be! Think of the rumors! But it was so early, like eight o’clock in the morning. Michelle didn’t know anyone who got up that early. Maybe she’d see someone stumbling back from one of Captain’s after-parties or something.

Blood! Michelle gasped. Had the van been used in a crime?

Not a lot, the cop said. Maybe none at all. But there’s something on that seat. We’ll have to open it up. Michelle and Quinn stared at one another in excited horror. What if there was like a dead body in the van? Both watched a lot of Unsolved Mysteries and had bonded over a mutual obsession with Robert Stack, his suits and his hair and his grim delivery. They liked when he delivered his mournful epilogues before a blue screen no one had bothered to project an image onto. It was so low-rent — the sordid vanishings, the bad reenactments, the alarming sound track.

If There Is A Dead Body In The Van I Could End Up On Unsolved Mysteries, Michelle whispered, but the cop heard her. He played down the likelihood of murder.

It’s not like a blood bath in there, he said, glancing at them in the rearview mirror a little too long. Michelle grew nervous. If there was a murder the lovers would be immediate suspects. Warrants to search Michelle’s home would be issued swiftly. Drugs would be discovered and nobody likes a druggie. People kill for drugs, everyone knows that. Drugs are a gateway crime for murder. Quinn was already passively lying to the cop, allowing him to think she was a man even though no one had said anything. It didn’t matter. None of it would look good on paper. Michelle forsook her Unsolved Mysteries aspirations and hoped there were no dead bodies in the van.

The van — a Dodge, fat and blue — had been brought to the curb at a hectic angle and abandoned. No windows were smashed. The vehicle was laughably easy to break into, you jiggled the handle and the locks practically popped themselves open for you. The pair looked for the blood the cop had mentioned. They found it on the cracked front seat, a few dark red sprinkles on the pleather. A bizarrely familiar sticky nub of heroin clung there as well. A plastic bag of syringes on the floor. The van had been stolen by junkies! A Big Gulp from the 7-Eleven sat on the dash, the ice melted, condensation sweating through the waxy cup. Everywhere were cookie crumbs, as if the joyriding dopeheads had grabbed great fistfuls of animal crackers and crushed them in their palms, flinging the sweet debris around the vehicle like confetti. Someone had had a great time in that van. Michelle walked around the side of it and slid open the door for the cop. It was empty.

All right, the cop said, I got a tow truck coming, you can pick it up at 850 Bryant.

What? Michelle asked. Can’t I Just Take It?

It got a ticket for being parked in a bus zone, the cop explained, and on top of that you have a bunch of outstanding parking tickets. You like to park on the sidewalk, it looks like?

Fucking Ziggy! Drunk driving home from the bar and leaving the van on the sidewalk in front of her house. The arrogance! Those Weren’t My Tickets, Michelle began.

This vehicle has too many tickets. You pay them at 850 Bryant and we’ll release the van to you. And, here. The cop grabbed the bag of needles and flung them at Michelle. Take care of these please.

The cop’s work was done. He gave them a nod of dismissal. Michelle was aghast. She’d been pulled out of her narcotic slumber for this? To be abandoned on top of some godforsaken hilly part of San Francisco she had never been to? Where was the Mission? Aren’t You Going To Drive Us Back?

I’m not a taxi, the cop said. He went back to his squad car to wait for the tow truck.

What Am I Supposed To Do With These? Michelle shook the bag at Quinn. Never mind what she would do now that the van had been impounded. She couldn’t afford to bail it out, no way. It would rot there. How would Michelle get off this sinking ship of a city? Michelle had to get out of there. The energetic walls of San Francisco were closing in on her. Of course the van had been stolen, her plan ruined, by druggies. How desperate do you have to be to actually inject something into your bloodstream? You did not have control of your life if you were unable to wait two minutes for the drugs to work through your sinuses.

I Cannot Bring These Home, Michelle said intensely, rattling the bag.

Of course not, Quinn shrugged.

No Really, Michelle said.

Throw them away, Quinn nodded at a trash can on the curb.

Someone Could Get Stuck. A Sanitation Worker.

So? They’re clean.

Yeah, But Imagine How Scared They’d Be. They Wouldn’t Know They’re Clean. They’d Have To Get Tested And Everything.

There are actual dirty needles in the trash in San Francisco, Quinn said. There’s like toxic waste. I’m sure they wear gloves and stuff.

Michelle’s mother Wendy had once been stuck with a questionable needle at the psych hospital. She was dosed with precautionary AIDS meds that made her terribly sick. For a week she writhed in bed, sweating from fever dreams of sawing her own lip off or having bullets lodged in her brain. She was certain she had AIDS, punished by God, but for what? Being gay? Did Wendy really believe that? She supposed, in some dark corner of her brain, she did. And the AIDS medication had turned her brain into one big dark corner.

Michelle and Kyle learned of their mother’s hardship like they always did, long after the fact, when the opportunity to help had come and gone.

Why Didn’t You Tell Us? Michelle wailed, though what could she have done? Her mothers were so far away, and plane rides were pricey.

If Michelle thought about putting the needles in the trash can on the sidewalk she thought of her mother’s hand, laden with Claddagh rings and shaded with nicotine, reaching in and getting pricked.

I’ll Take Them To The Hospital, she said.

Walking through the lobby, searching for a biohazard bin, Michelle couldn’t stop thinking of her moms. She hadn’t told them she was moving. Michelle’s life made her moms nervous and Michelle hated the feeling of it — sort of monstrous, always bad all the time. They were happy she was gay, of course, but she was a weird sort of gay, a degenerate gay. She didn’t want to sue the government for the right to marry, she wasn’t interested in gays in the military, she was queerly promiscuous and thought that this was enough, that this was activism. 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.

Wendy and Kym checked in on Michelle and Kyle, and Michelle and Kyle checked in on their moms, and then the siblings checked in with each other about their moms — epic conversations wherein Michelle and Kyle detailed all the ways in which their mothers’ lives were sad and stunted, all the ways they could be better if they would just do something to improve their circumstances. They clucked and marveled at Wendy’s unwillingness to become a different person, not this chain-smoking, codependent caretaker of crazy people by day and Kym by night. Working too much overtime, getting bleary with sleep deprivation and then jabbing herself with a needle. Michelle and Kyle talked about the needle incident forever. Was it a cry for help? How ironic it would be for their mother of all people to get AIDS.

And what about Kym? Was she really sick? Had Michelle seen the movie Safe? Kyle wanted to know. Was their other mother really physically ill or was she profoundly depressed, mentally ill, or, even worse, was she simply a lazy bitch? The options were all so terrible to consider. They found themselves oddly hoping that their mom was in fact struck down by a diabolical, new environmental illness.

Everyone hung up their phones upset and grim. Everyone’s hearts were clogged with love for one other — inexpressible, jammed-up love, love that leached like a toxin into the bloodstream, one it would take a surgery to release. This was a family.

Sometimes Michelle tripped out on her deep and painful love for her mothers. If they weren’t related, Wendy would just be one of those trashy lesbians she couldn’t relate to. Kym would be one of those people you see on the bus, sick and stoned. It seemed everything had gone wrong for these people — if there was a social injustice it had happened to them, if there was a malaise they suffered from it, if there was bad luck they’d been stroked by it. Michelle felt repelled by these people, as if their condition, the whole of it, was contagious. She felt bad about this but it was true. And her own mother was one of them. Sickly and paranoid, a drain on those around her. Michelle loved her with a love that had nowhere to go, a bird flying into a window.

Michelle couldn’t save her mothers and that was all her love was meant to do. And so the love was useless and exhausting. It turned to rage inside Michelle and so she also hated them. Why was she supposed to help them? Michelle could barely help herself. She lived below the poverty level in a city rapidly filling with rich people. At least Wendy had a career. She could go back to school and better her earning power, she could stop smoking. Kym had gone to community college, she could stop smoking pot, go to therapy, get on an antidepressant, leave the house, make some friends, maybe teach a fucking class or something. Why did Michelle feel like she had to do such things for these women, register Wendy for classes or find a homeopath for Kym?

Michelle felt responsible for her moms’ happiness. She felt she owed them something, something big. The families that had disowned them were full of older women whose go-getter daughters had married up or gotten into antiques and took their mothers gambling in Atlantic City or on Caribbean cruises. Was that what Michelle was supposed to do? Was that what her moms were waiting for? Another perk that their lesbianism had robbed them of.

And so it was in this dark space that Michelle entered the hospital on the hill, a bag of needles in her hand, thinking that by saving a hypothetical sanitation worker she was somehow helping her moms. Deep in the throes of her emotional bender, Michelle was oblivious to her appearance. She looked like a wild drug addict, face bloated and splotchy, hair a blue tangle, malnourished in her skinny jeans, braless in her thin shirt, the twin pyramids of her tits poking around, her nipples staring out from the worn rattlesnake fabric. The secretary showed alarm at the bag of needles in her hand. Can I help you?

My Van Was Stolen And Whoever Did It Left These—rattle, rattle—In The Back Seat. They’re Clean But Maybe You Have A Biohazard Container I Can Leave These In?

The woman’s face twitched. You can’t bring those in here.

You Don’t Have A Biohazard Container? I Don’t Think They’re Dirty But—

You can’t just bring a bunch of needles into a hospital trying to dump them. There are laws, we can’t even—

I’m Not Just Bringing Them, My Van Was Stolen And They Dumped It Outside And Left These — Michelle cut herself off as the reality of her appearance dawned on her. She felt embarrassed, then mad at her embarrassment. She was telling the truth! She was the victim of a crime! Though perhaps she was what the woman thought she was, those weren’t her fucking needles. Fine, she spat, I Was Just Trying To Make Sure Some Poor Sanitation Worker Didn’t Get Stuck, But I’ll Go Throw Them In The Trash Out Front Then.

You can’t, the woman said nervously. You can’t just leave them in a public trash can. And you can’t leave them on our property. The two stared each other down. What was one supposed to do with a bag of fucking needles then? Oh, hold on, the woman’s annoyance broke and she punched some numbers into her phone. Eventually a man showed up, a doctor looking harried and a little nervous, possibly scared of Michelle.

Can I help you? he asked at a distance. Rattle, rattle. Michelle shook the bag.

I’m Just Looking To Get Rid Of These. They’re Not Mine. I Found Them. If I Was Shooting Drugs Why Would I Be Throwing Away A Perfectly Good Bag Of Needles?

The phrase a perfectly good bag of needles rang in Michelle’s head. Why was she throwing them away? The dealers on her corner sold rigs as well as drugs, they whispered outfits, outfits under their breath at passersby. Maybe she could have gotten her new friend Quinn to barter with them, trade the needles for some balloons. Too late now. The doctor moved toward Michelle to receive the bag. A clear plastic bag jumbled with clear plastic syringes, clear plastic syringes with bright orange caps.

Thanks, Michelle said. She’d been ready to fight the doctor and now had to readjust herself internally. The doctor seemed kind. He had white hair and white clothes and clear spectacles on his eyes.

Are you okay? he asked her. Do you need anything? His voice was heavy with subtext but Michelle didn’t want to know what he was getting at. She hated how shifty she must’ve seemed, hungover, talking about a stolen van, wielding a bag of drug needles.

No, she said, her voice extra cheery like she was interviewing for a job. Just Happy To Have My Van Back! Never Had To Handle A Bag Of Needles Before, Didn’t Really Know What To Do With Them! She laughed a big laugh and shook her head at how crazy life was. She was an average citizen having a really weird day. She waved goodbye at the doctor, at the receptionist who still wasn’t convinced Michelle was not a drug fiend, that she hadn’t stolen her own van, if there even was a van at all. She left the hospital. The light was so bright it rammed into her eyes and shot up her brain. Michelle couldn’t wear sunglasses. She was so blind she’d have to get prescription sunglasses and those were really expensive, so in the sun she just squinted a lot and held her hand to her forehead.

The doctor’s kindness had left her shaken. Why couldn’t her mother work for a nice guy like that? Maybe Michelle should start to look for nursing positions on the Internet, print them out, and send them to her mother, maybe her mothers would have a better quality of life in San Francisco. 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 did some people get excellent lives while other people’s lives were so shitty? She couldn’t bear the thought that her mothers’ lives sucked. It filled Michelle with heartbreak and panic. By the time she got back to Quinn she was in tears.

What happened? Quinn was alarmed.

The Doctor — Nothing. He Took Them. It Just Made Me Sad About My Mothers. Michelle burst into tears.

Oh! Quinn panicked at the sight of Michelle in tears. Partly she wanted to pet her new friend, but she was also aware that her new friend was sort of crazy. She didn’t want to get in too deep. She couldn’t tell if having a drug bond with someone was a light bond or a deep bond. It felt deep when they were high but so did everything. By the light of day, there by a bus stop in a random part of the city with this crying, trembling wreck of a girl, the sort of girl a person sees and says, Give her a cheeseburger! — scrawny and alive with wild emotion — Quinn wondered what the fuck she was doing. What, if anything, did she owe this person?

The bus came and the pair climbed aboard. At the back of the vehicle Michelle quietly wept. Her emotions were now almost 100 percent chemically regulated. She felt happy when high, nervous and tragic while crashing, peaceful as the intensity faded, optimistic as she planned her evening’s chemical intake — just alcohol tonight, just one beer, just a cocktail, maybe one line, the rest of the leftover nub of heroin and then no more until next week, no cocaine until the weekend, okay okay okay.

Quinn was not heartless. Her hand came to rest upon Michelle’s neck and stayed there, bouncing with the jumble of the bus. It felt nice. Michelle appreciated it. She didn’t think things were going anywhere with Quinn, but that was fine. Where was anywhere, anyway? All anyone had was this moment. Michelle was in the moment. She liked the way she was. People adopted lifelong courses of religious study to try to achieve a state that came naturally to her.

Quinn’s heart leaped when she realized this random bus skirted her neighborhood. Strangely, Quinn did not live in the Mission. She lived in some other neighborhood where, like the Mission, the streets were numbered, but they were not streets, they were avenues. People called that part of town the Avenues. It seemed sinister to Michelle, like the Mission’s evil twin. What did people do out there? Apparently, they watched The X-Files with their husbands. Michelle still could not understand that Quinn had such a thing.

What’s Your Husband Like? Michelle asked Quinn suddenly, realizing she had never inquired.

He’s really nice. He’s stable. I was having a lot of panic attacks when I married him. She paused. He takes glassblowing classes.

Is He Taller Than You? Michelle asked. Quinn nodded.

Is He Going To Let You Come To My Going-Away Party? Michelle asked. Quinn lifted her hand and bopped Michelle in the head.

It’s not the 1800s, Quinn laughed. I don’t have to ask him for permission to go to a party.

What About Sleep Over At My House? Michelle asked. Do You Have To Ask Him? Does He Care?

Quinn shrugged. He doesn’t love it.

What About Drugs, Does He Do Drugs?

No. I do drugs.

Michelle nodded. It didn’t actually sound like a bad arrangement. Sort of like a parent. Michelle would like someone to take care of her, too. But she’d had that with Andy. Something was always expected in return. It wasn’t worth it.

What About Driving Me To Los Angeles? Michelle asked. Is He Going To Be Okay With You Driving Me To Los Angeles Now That My Van Is Gone?

I’m not driving you to Los Angeles! Quinn laughed a nervous laugh and hit Michelle in the head once more.

You Have To, Michelle whined. How Else Will I Get There?

Can’t someone else drive you? Quinn asked.

No. You’re My Only Friend. She laid her head on Quinn’s shoulder and began to weep anew. She had meant it as a joke but it was too real. Stitch and Ziggy and Linda and Andy all felt variously betrayed by her, and she by them.

Oh, come on. Quinn shook Michelle from her shoulder.

You Kind Of Are. Michelle looked deeply, tearfully, into Quinn’s eyes, which meant into her eyeglasses, which reflected herself back to her. She looked like a wreck. It was not helping her situation. She would not be able to seduce Quinn, she was too grotesque. She would have to draw on the girl’s pity and her inability to say no.

How? I don’t have a car.

Your Husband Doesn’t Have A Car?

No, he rides a bike.

Oh, one of those. Does He Have A Credit Card? Michelle asked. Can One Of You Rent Me A U-Haul?

This is insane, Quinn said in a brief moment of clarity before she capitulated to Michelle’s tears and agreed to rent a U-Haul and drive her to Los Angeles in the morning.

13

Michelle’s going-away party began at the Eagle, a bar Michelle did not particularly like. The out-side was so dark and the heat lamps made her hot and sleepy and occasionally ignited a clump of dead twigs and leaves. She could never find who she was looking for, and there was no place to sit unless you pulled yourself up on the tables and then your dangling legs made your feet fall asleep. But it was big enough to accommodate a large gathering and you could smoke outside, and if you hadn’t eaten all day you could feed yourself from the wooden barrel of peanuts by the door, so that was good. The after-party would be at Michelle’s.

Stitch was excited about this, as Stitch was generally amenable to an after-party. Ekundayo hated after-parties. She had to breathe down the violence she felt whenever Michelle and Stitch brought one home. But this one was different. Michelle was finally leaving. It was a true celebration. Ekundayo was not joyful enough to join the festivities but she would not bust them up, would not drag her stick through the living room on her way to piss in the water closet, glaring at the little doped-up fools snorting lines off the dumpstered coffee table. Michelle had dragged that coffee table back from the Marina, a nice neighborhood. Andy had arranged a couple’s counseling session for them there during the Linda era. The counseling had gone poorly. They’d spent most of the hour unpacking why Andy didn’t like going to the movies. What’s wrong with the movies? the therapist, who’d had a lot of plastic surgery, had asked in a slightly shaming voice.

I don’t know, Andy shrugged, uneasy. I just don’t like going to the movies.

Well, maybe Michelle would like to go to the movies? the therapist suggested in a more playful yet still scornful tone.

Yeah! Michelle chimed in. The therapist liked her! The therapist was on her side, would understand why Michelle had to look elsewhere to get her needs met. Andy wouldn’t even go to the movies with her! What was that about? But when the focus shifted to Michelle, she bristled. I Don’t Think Long-Term Relationships Are Inherently More Important Than Short Relationships, she said airily. We Learn All Sorts Of Lessons From All Sorts Of People, Who’s To Say Which Relationships Are More Meaningful? Michelle was busting out the big hippie guns.

So, the therapist began, do you not want a long-term relationship with Carlotta?

I Want The Relationship To Be What It Is In The Moment, Michelle said. I Don’t Want To Label It. I Want It To Be Free. I Just Want To Go To The Movies Sometimes. She tried bringing it back around to the movies, she’d liked that part. The rest of the conversation felt so stressful. Why were they even there? What did Andy want from her? It must have been so expensive, the therapist, and Michelle wasn’t paying for it, not even a little.

We’ll talk more about this next week. The therapist leveled her surgically lifted eyes at Michelle. I think there is a lot to discover here. But Michelle knew there would be no next week. She felt confused and surly as they left the therapist’s office, on the verge of lashing out at Andy. And then she found the coffee table, sleek and black, a higher quality of trash than the stuff left curbside in the Mission. Andy drove it home for her in the back of her classic car.

But the party! Many people came. Not as many as would have come if Michelle had packed up and left town about a year or so earlier, before becoming such a druggie that some began avoiding her. A certain demographic was present. Those who had shared bindles of cocaine with Michelle, key bumps in the queer bar bathroom, or lines on the pinball machine at the Albion. People she had popped open tiny ziplock baggies of crystal meth with. Michelle’s speed dealer came, though she would not have ever called him that, no way, that made it seem like their relationship was based on, well, drugs, when it wasn’t, it was based on a shared enthusiasm for The Gossip, an enduring affection for Courtney Love no matter how fucking crazy she was, a nostalgia for old San Francisco, before the yuppies and the dot-commers had come, when the good old drag queens were still alive. Michelle’s speed dealer DJ’d at some of the better — meaning seedier — fag bars in town, ones where leathermen hung out totally naked but for their caps and boots, sucking each other off in the corner.

Michelle would miss San Francisco. She couldn’t think about it too much lest it give her a panic attack. Her bedroom, that blue and sparkly place, was all but empty of her now. She’d packed herself up and loaded it into the truck Quinn had parked on the corner. Her futon was the only thing left in the room. Michelle and Quinn would sleep one more night on it, then drag it down the stairs and leave it by the parking meter for some desperate person to take home. Until then Michelle would drink with the last of her friends. She would accept drugs from the tips of proffered house keys. She would play Truth or Dare.

Michelle dared a girl she didn’t know to stuff her ass crack full of leftover rice from a bowl in the fridge. Michelle then poured soy sauce onto it and dared Quinn to eat it. Michelle had seen Quinn watching the girl, who had long dyed black hair and the eyes of a crazy person. The party was thick with uninhibited druggie sex vibes. Quinn knelt before the strange girl, stuffed with food and spread across the Marina coffee table like a human buffet. She dug her mouth into the soft, cold pile of rice and swallowed. People cheered.

The two of them were visibly enjoying the attention. Michelle watched along with the others, her feelings swirling into violent focus. She had given the dare to let Quinn know she was on to her. Michelle had bitch’s intuition, she always knew when someone was vibing her date — if that’s what Quinn was — or when her date was even thinking about thinking about vibing someone else. That Michelle could detect the vibrations before the vibers were even sure of what they were feeling gave her a sensation of superiority and power. Michelle was of some other, rarefied realm, so above the mundane sexual tensions of commoners like Quinn and this girl with the rice up her ass, their flirtations as blatant and tacky as tabloids.

Michelle was disappointed in Quinn. The girl was a two-bit stripper who couldn’t wait to tell everyone about what a stripper she was, as if everyone in the room hadn’t already been a stripper for a million years. The girl was tedious. Michelle looked around for someone to get a crush on, but there was no one left. She knew everyone already, had known them for so long she was bored of their friendship, even. The cocaine was crashing Michelle before she was even off the ground with it. Michelle hated cocaine. Her mood darkened. Why did people bother when speed was so much stronger, cheaper, and kept you high so much longer? Well, maybe some people want to fall asleep eventually, a partygoer defended her shitty cocaine in the face of Michelle’s tirade.

It’s Like Watching TV With No Cable, Michelle said scornfully. It’s Like Playing Atari When You Could Be Playing Nintendo. Michelle’s reference points were whack.

Have another line, someone gently shaped a tuft of drugs into a stream and Michelle inhaled it. She felt okay for one minute, excellent for five, then promptly suicidal. She looked for Quinn. She was helping Rice Ass wipe soy sauce from her thighs with a dirty dishrag. There were probably roaches on the rag, it had come from the kitchen. Michelle hoped the girl found one on her pussy. Better yet, she hoped Quinn found it there for her. Wait, did she really hope that? She thought about it. She walked over to where Quinn was rubbing the edge of the dish towel under the elastic of the girl’s shiny underwear. All around them it was a melee of make-outs and more. Two people were showily fucking on the dirty armchair in the corner by the window. Outside the window Michelle could see the Filipino metalheads next door sitting on their back stairs and watching the spectacle. They sat out there most nights, drinking beer poured over ice and listening to Metallica cassettes on a pink boom box shaped like the grill of a Cadillac. They were pretty cool boys, one rode a dirt bike and was cute like a butch girl. Michelle wondered if she should invite them over. She’d miss them more than half the people currently celebrating her departure. She gave them a little wave and they waved back. She was at Quinn’s side.

I Want To Kill Myself, Michelle said.

What happened? Quinn smiled. Rice Ass hadn’t heard anything. She just sat there with her legs spread, smelling like Chinese leftovers. Liquid eyeliner flicked out from the edges of her eyelids and red lipstick had etched her mouth into a perfect heart-shaped pout. Michelle tried not to look at her and leaned in closer to Quinn.

I Want To Kill Myself, she repeated.

Are you serious? Quinn asked, bewildered. What are you talking about?

You Know What I Mean, Michelle snapped, sick of repeating herself, sick of hunching over because Quinn couldn’t pull herself away from Rice Ass’s crotch, sick of Rice Ass’s flawlessly made-up face staring at her with those sociopathic blue eyes, sick of feeling like indeed, yes, she had become the psychotically jealous person at the party, at her own party, her own going-away party, this was how she would be leaving San Francisco, in ruin, humiliated, staging a suicidal cry for help because she could not deal with the attentions of her casual and married drug and sex acquaintance being pulled from her for five minutes.

You Know What I Mean, she said again, choking on tears now, and dashed down the long hallway into her empty bedroom.

I Didn’t Really Want To Kill Myself, Michelle insisted a little later. It Was A Feeling Of Wanting To Kill Myself. It Was How I Felt. But I Would Never Do That.

Well, Jesus, Quinn huffed. Michelle was snotty with tears, her face was already swelling. Her emotions were a feral animal that she could not get her arms around.

I Was Just Upset, she said. I Feel So Emotional About Leaving San Francisco And I Look Over And You’re Giving The Poor Man’s Bettie Page A Rim Job.

But you dared me to! Now Quinn was mad. We were playing a game!

I Saw You Looking At Her, Michelle seethed. Vibing Her. And I Just Felt Like You Like Her So Much Why Don’t You Just Eat Rice From Her Ass Then? Michelle knew in her gut that cocaine was to blame for this harsh scene. If the cocaine had been better she wouldn’t have crashed so hard so fast, felt so crazy. If the cocaine had been good she would have felt powerful and sexy and she would have eaten the rice from the stripper’s ass, or had the girl eat the rice from her ass. She would have done something lunatic and memorable and very, very sexy. With better cocaine she could have left San Francisco like that, high on the wave of her own reputation. Not like this, with people down the hall gossiping about her in her own living room. With Rice Ass, smug in her beauty, thinking Michelle an unhinged bitch. With poor Quinn rethinking her decision to slum it outside matrimony with a hysterical and aging femme who could not handle her cocaine — oh no, was that Michelle? That was Michelle. She wept into her futon. There was a slight knocking. It was Ziggy, calling into the bedroom. She cracked open the door.

I’m going home. You’re leaving in the morning, right? I’ll come say goodbye. Rice Ass flew up suddenly behind her. Her face, undeniably striking, gorgeous even, pushed through Ziggy’s orange hair as if through a fringed curtain. She rested her chin on Ziggy’s shoulder.

Thanks for the party! she cried cheerily. She shot a wink at Quinn. Let’s go, she pulled Ziggy by her studded belt backward out the door. Michelle listened to them clatter down the stairs, their voices rising giddily from the sidewalk below the window.

Ugh, I can’t believe she’d go home with that person! Quinn spat.

Ugh, I Can’t Believe You Care! Michelle raged, a fresh batch of tears exploding from her eyes. She’s Like A Trashy Fucking Dime-A-Dozen Stripper! Gross! And If I Had A Best Friend, Which I Do Not, It Would Be Ziggy, So Shut Up!

Quinn put her hands up to ward off Michelle’s charging emotions. Sorry, sorry. She reached out and actually petted Michelle’s head. Quinn was a Libra, she couldn’t bear for the upset to linger. She’s actually a sex-work activist, that girl, Quinn said. She does really cool work. She’s unionizing the club she works at. She read your book, she really likes you. She couldn’t believe she was at your party.

Ugh! Michelle cried. She didn’t know what to say to all of this, so she made unattractive animal noises instead. Ugh! Ack! Ech! She slammed her head back down on the futon and cried. She cried for her room, which was not hers anymore. She cried for the bookstore, which had employed her in spite of her being so unemployable, just because they thought it was cool that she’d written a book. Now who would employ her? She cried for the friends who had come to her party, who she had all but ignored in the face of Quinn’s flirtations. She cried for the friends who hadn’t come to her party because they weren’t really her friends anymore, just people she used to be friends with, how had that happened, how had Michelle allowed them to drift away? She cried because Quinn’s giant palm was resting on her thigh and it didn’t mean anything.

Quinn was thinking the exact same thoughts as Michelle: that their whole connection was a mistake born of drugs, that if not for Quinn’s weakness of will she would be back with her husband where she belonged, plucking tender pops from a warm bowl of popcorn, snuggling. You know, she began, I think I’m going to head home.

What? Michelle was alarmed.

Don’t worry, I’ll still drive you to Los Angeles, okay?

You Have To, Michelle begged desperately. You Really, Really Have To.

I don’t actually have to, Quinn corrected her. She was glad this person was leaving. When Michelle was gone Quinn would go to Kabuki hot springs and spend all day in the sauna. She would find kale, somewhere she would find it, and she would eat it. She had had her dalliance with heroin, maybe she’d write some poems about it. It had been crazy and Quinn had been looking for crazy. But she was done. She craved feeling her husband beside her, the sleeping bulk of him, like snuggling down with a bear in the woods. She found her jacket on Michelle’s floor, red leather with extreme snaps and lapels. No one looking at Quinn would ever think she had a husband and you know what? Quinn thought that was cool.

See you in the morning. Get some sleep. Quinn crouched beside her crying friend and gave her hair a ruffle. Michelle shrugged it off. Sometimes Michelle felt like everyone else was a poser and she was the only authentic person in the whole world. She was 100 percent on this. There was nowhere else for her to be, no husband to return to, nothing safe, nothing anywhere. It was a lonely thought. She fell asleep trying to make it feel triumphant.

14

Michelle woke in the morning to the noise of Ziggy hip-chucking the bedroom door open. Layers of paint kept it stuck to the jamb, it required a bit of violence to pop open. The punch of it giving way stirred Michelle, alone on her futon. Her sinuses, clogged with snot and cocaine, had drained into the left side of her head as she slept, and so her face looked lopsided, puffier on that end, like a fun-house mirror or the boy from Mask. Ziggy walked into the room with two coffees steaming from their paper cups. Rise and shine, LA woman. It was incredible how well Ziggy functioned. Her neck was spotted with hickeys as if with leprosy. Her goggles held her unwashed hair back from her face, which was scrubbed clean. Ziggy used fancy face wash that heated up as it lathered. She smelled like the inside of an Aveda salon. Michelle did not know how she did it. She had been up all night fucking that girl and had arrived exactly on time to awaken Michelle, with coffee. Michelle lowered her face into the steaming cup and let the bitter cloud rouse her.

Your married woman’s outside and ready to go, Ziggy said. You excited?

Michelle shrugged. Do I Look Like Mask? she asked, touching the swollen roll of her face. Like Eric Stoltz In The Movie Mask? Where He Has That Disease, You Know, It Makes His Face All Bumpy?

And Cher is his mom? Ziggy asked. And she’s like a biker and gets him a hooker for his birthday?

Yeah!

I fucking love that movie. Ziggy pulled a pack of Camels from the ass of her white jeans and lit up in the empty room.

But Do I Look Like That?

Ziggy squinted at her friend. I don’t know, she said slowly. I don’t think you look like Cher.

No, Do I Look Like The Boy, The Boy In Mask!

Oh god! Ziggy snorted a cloud of smoke from her nose. No, you don’t look like the boy in Mask. Why? Because you were crying?

You Can Tell?

Ziggy nodded. Michelle drank her coffee.

You didn’t have a great going-away party?

Michelle’s finger shot out and poked the mottled skin of Ziggy’s neck. You Did.

That girl’s crazy, Ziggy said with a grin. She rubbed her neck and winced. She bit my fucking throat off. She drew on her cigarette like an asthmatic sucking on an inhaler and tossed the butt out the window. I should get back there, I left her outside in her car.

Who? That Girl?

Lelrine, yeah. She’s out front with Quinn.

That Girl! That Girl!

Yeah. Ziggy shrugged.

God, I Fucking Hate That Girl!

Ziggy looked unfazed. She likes you. She brought your book, she wants you to sign it.

Ugh! Michelle cried and reinserted herself into the futon, sinking her face into the pillow. Ack! Ech! Ziggy kicked her gently with the toe of her motorcycle boot.

Get up, she said. Get off that and I’ll drag this downstairs for you.

Outside, Lelrine clambered off the hood of her purple Datsun, where she had been perched, flirting with Quinn. She charged toward Michelle bearing a copy of Michelle’s book. Michelle autographed it. She inscribed, To Lelrine, On the day of my departure. I will never forget you. Lelrine looked different in the daylight, with no makeup on her face or rice in her ass. She was in her walk-of-shame ensemble of satin hot pants, a ratty T-shirt stretched like skin across her intense tits. Michelle would have to find out from Ziggy if they were real. Michelle sort of loved fake tits. It was her favorite part of any strip bar, the girls with the boobs that looked like someone had hurled them onto their chests from across the room, strong as muscles with a little wobble. They fascinated Michelle.

She waved to the pair as they drove off in the little purple car. She sat on her front stoop and thought nostalgically how she would never sit there again. So much had happened on that stoop. She’d cried, of course, over girls who had stopped loving her, and she had smoked many cigarettes, she had drunk beers. She’d written part of her book here, her back against her front door, pen in a notebook, crying over a girl who had stopped loving her while smoking and drinking beer. She wanted to nail a plaque to it, the stoop. There was that one sweet crackhead related to the woman who lived on the first floor. Michelle would often come down and see the lady sitting on the stairs, nodded out. Michelle would startle her and the lady would swiftly begin sweeping the stoop with her hands, brushing debris into her palm with her fingers.

I’m Susie’s cousin, she’d say in a stuffed-up voice. Susie said I could sit here. She’d dust a little path for Michelle to pass through.

It’s Fine, Michelle assured her. Generally Michelle didn’t mind if people sat on her stairs. Sometimes gangs of boys with bottles of beer would be intimidating, but they weren’t shitty to her and once even helped her upstairs with her laundry. Susie’s cousin was very tender and had such a strange, froggy voice. Stitch enjoyed imitating her.

I’m Sooseez cousin, Stitch would roll her eyes back and pantomime sweeping with her hands. Sooseee said I could sit here. Stitch did really good impressions. She did the Susie’s cousin imitation to Ekundayo once and it made her hostile. Ekundayo acted like drug addicts were holy and became defensive if you laughed at them, like you were being racist or poking fun at a disabled person.

It’s not funny, she said.

It Actually Is, Michelle said. It’s Actually Quite Funny. Stitch also did a killer imitation of a junkie they’d seen nodding off with a bag of chips in his hand at the gas station, but she only did it privately, to Michelle, to make her laugh. People could be really sensitive about drug addicts.

Michelle thought about Stitch, upstairs in her bedroom, her choppy haircut asleep on some strange pillow filled with barley or natural husks. The pillow was horribly uncomfortable but Stitch swore it was good for your neck. Stitch. Michelle’s eyes teared. She wasn’t going to wake her friend up, Stitch knew she was leaving. She could have come down and said goodbye. Whatever. This city was stupid. Michelle lifted herself off the stairs and walked slowly toward the U-Haul, where Quinn sat resentfully in the driver’s seat.

15

The heat in the truck’s cab was grisly. California was on fire and once out of San Francisco the highway shimmered in the windshield like a mirage. The land on the margins was dry, even charred. The farmland decreased as they drove. The water was too ruined for effective farming and the animals were out of whack, the bugs and the birds, the pests and pollinators. They drove past wide plowed fields whose sickly crops had been abandoned. What Do You Think That Was? Michelle asked, staring at the mangled stalks, everything hay colored beneath the brutal sun. Quinn shrugged and kept her eyes on the road.

Michelle hadn’t left San Francisco in eight years and Quinn, a native, never had. The ocean was a giant toilet lapping at San Francisco’s edges, but mainly things were functioning. On the highway Michelle felt alarmed at all the dead land. These towns were abandoned. A gas station had been torched, blackening everything around it in a wide, ruined circle. Michelle leaned back against the leather seat, her skin stuck hotly to it, suctioned with sweat. She watched the wasteland glide by on the 405.

Then, the cows. The cities of cows stretched out into the trashed landscape for miles, a pixilated black and white, their spotted backs blurring together until the sight of them all became something else entirely, a surrealist landscape, an M. C. Escher drawing referencing infinity.

The smell was something to complain about for the first twenty minutes. It was as if their faces were being cruelly mashed into a vat of wet shit. The humidity rose as they entered the cow cities, the steam of the animals’ sweat and breath and farts, the water systems churning to douse them, all of it changed the air, saturating it, carrying the stench. The sounds, too, the dull bleats and moos. The cows continued alongside them forever. Cowshwitz, Quinn spoke. She had heard of this part of the drive. Her husband had warned her of it, gambled she’d become vegetarian by the time they drove out of it.

The lovers tried various things to save them from the smell, such as cupping their hands over their faces and inhaling instead their own rank breath. Michelle lit cigarettes. She held a carton of chocolate milk over her mouth and nose like an oxygen mask, smelled sweetly sour candy before the stink of shit rushed back in. They breathed through their mouths, giving them the disgusting feeling of eating the smell. Their tongues rooted their gums, searching for the taste of cow dung. Eventually they could no longer smell it, despite the bovine landscape shifting toward the horizon, their collective motion like the swells of a gentle tide. It was creepy to know the horrible shit cloud was still with them, entering their bodies. They would try to locate it, pulling air through their noses the way Ziggy smoked her cigarettes, but they smelled nothing, nothing at all. And so they relaxed, succumbing to their bodies’ merciful denial.

Michelle allowed the incomprehensible landscape to fuck with her mind. The round-backed cows became a sort of sea, she then allowed the sea, emerging beneath the cliffs, to become a menagerie, the lumps of trash beneath the pudding waves taking the shapes of animals she’d seen in books and magazines — a thick gorilla, a wide-eared elephant, the spindly neck of a giraffe. The waves drew back and heaved forward, the nauseated contractions of someone poisoned. Michelle saw real buses and airplanes, shopping carts and the roof of a home. An old telephone pole strung with gunk. She unfocused her eyes and they became dinosaurs, sea monsters. Broken boats bobbed, abandoned, looking like ghostly pirate ships. Perhaps some of them were. Across it all a web of oil stretched, like ebony lace or fishnet stockings.