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.