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.