Free Black Wave by Michelle Tea Page A

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