Black Wave (3 page)

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.