Free Black Wave by Michelle Tea

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,