Hey, Lou Reed, Michelle poked at Quinn’s broad shoulder. Quinn had shoulders like a football player. Michelle’s poke did little to disturb her. Quinn seemed like a giant in Michelle’s bed, a whale beached upon her futon. A lovely beluga, long and white. Tall people were sort of alien to Michelle, whose growth was likely stunted by her time spent in Wendy’s smoky womb. How had this strange creature landed in Michelle’s bed? Surely it was the ocean. Michelle’s sinuses felt waterlogged from kissing her. She was proud of how little she cared if they were girlfriends or not. The part of her heart that usually roiled with longing had been sated by the heroin. Michelle felt more functional for it.
Quinn’s eyes cracked open as Michelle nudged her in the gut with the heel of her foot. Hey, Quinn, Would You Please Answer The Door? Michelle asked, running her hands anxiously over her nakedness. It’s The Cops. I’ll Hide The Drugs.
Quinn watched Michelle open a desk drawer stuffed with flyers for long-ago poetry readings and black-and-white strips of photo-booth pictures. With a sweep of her hand she knocked the drugs, the spoon, and the chopped-up pens, the lighter and the wrappers, into the drawer and banged it shut it with the side of her hip, mumbling a rising chant of alarm. The doorbell honked again.
Get It! Michelle cried, anxious. Please! Quinn sat up in bed, her rarely seen giant breasts exposed to the day. She felt around Michelle’s bedding for her T-shirt. It was a magic T-shirt — when she put it on, her breasts disappeared. Quinn wondered how many times this week she had purchased their drugs in full sight of the cameras the city had mounted on street lights to dissuade drug dealing. They’d been hard for Quinn to take seriously — was there really someone somewhere eating donuts in front of a screen, watching it all go down? No way. But what if she was wrong?
Um, I’d rather you answer it, Quinn said, thinking, Who is this bitch? First Michelle made her buy the heroin, so as to not risk this “reputation” she thought she had. Quinn had a hard time saying no — like most females, she was codependent — so she approached the dealers and made the purchase, and surely it helped that she looked like a guy, even a weird one. If Michelle made the purchase in her teeter-totter heels and the slip she was failing to pass off as a dress, it was possible that the dealer might harass her and Michelle would not roll with it, she would get into a scream-fight with the dealer, she would whap him with her heavy plastic purse, who knows what would happen. So, fine, Quinn bought the drugs, but fuck if she was going to answer the door to Michelle’s house, this person who — let’s be real — was still a stranger to her.
Quinn was proud of herself for this rational and self-protective train of thought. It quelled her fears that her life was out of control. The doorbell shrilled the air around them.
Oh! Michelle yelped, suddenly lucid. It Could Be About The Van! She pulled a pair of black skinny jeans from the floor and wrestled on a clingy long-sleeved shirt that made her skin look like a rattlesnake’s. She slapped her bare feet down the front staircase. She was suddenly grateful for the cops’ diligence, doggedly ringing the bell, ringing the bell. She flung the door open with a swoosh that scattered the nest of junk mail padding the landing. Grocery store circulars, a local BDSM group’s social calendar, and a postcard announcing Ani DiFranco’s upcoming tour dates washed up around her ankles.
Are you Michelle Le-Dus-ki? the cop carefully sounded the syllables.
Yes! Michelle cried. Did You Find My Van? He had found her van. It had been abandoned in a bus zone across from UCSF Medical Center. Let Me Get — Someone, Michelle spluttered, and dashed back up the stairs. They Found The Van They Found The Van They Found The Van! Michelle danced around the room. Quinn felt saturated with relief, a relief that swept through her body like drugs. That was scary. Maybe she would stop being such a miscreant. For years she had been happy with a bottle of wine and whatever pills she could bum off friends with bad backs and anxiety disorders. But she wondered if she could be happy with such chemicals now that she’d seen the bliss abyss.
Michelle and Quinn left the bedroom, moved past the trash pile and down the stairs. A gigantic heap of garbage sat at the very top of Michelle’s staircase, where feng shui tradition suggested you place an altar to welcome guests and purify outside energies. It had been accumulating there for nearly a year. At first it had been a couple items too cumbersome to place into the trash cans, objects waiting to be left by the curb on Big Trash Night. But no one knew when Big Trash Night was scheduled and no one took up the task of finding out, and so the junk lingered, was joined by more junk, growing until it looked like an art installation, a pyramid of bulging, shiny trash bags, alien pods cocooning new life. In a perverse way Michelle supposed it was a feng shui altar for their era. If nature had mostly been replaced by garbage than wouldn’t a “natural” altar be sort of phony, nostalgic even? The trash pile evoked the shores of Ocean Beach, where the tide brought industrial wreckage on the sand with the blind generosity of a pet cat leaving a kill on your pillow. The ocean wanted only to give and had been wrecked of its ability to bring anything but regurgitated garbage. Michelle thought everyone should live with a giant trash heap in their homes. They deserved it.
Quinn gave a short glance at the cop and felt her empty belly rumble with hunger and dread. She’d thrown up some pizza last night after the drugs had hit her, that was the hunger. The dread was, well, the cop was bound to mistake her for a boy. Quinn would either have to correct his mistake or sit there, anxiously waiting for the dude to figure it out. The anticipation would be agonizing. If the cop caught his blunder he’d feel played and betrayed and it would be left to Quinn to comfort him. The cop would resent Quinn for being so gender ambiguous — it wasn’t his fault, anyone would mistake her for a man, look at her, why does she look like that if she doesn’t want to be a man anyway, this fucking city, I’m getting transferred to Vallejo.
Quinn’s gender confusion studded each day with potential land mines. Who knew what would happen? Public bathrooms were famously traumatizing, even in San Francisco. Queers stuck to their bubbles for a reason, the outside world was hostile. But the cop hadn’t paid her much attention since the initial bro-down head-nod. Quinn was passing. She settled into a morning of maleness.
Without even looking at Quinn, Michelle knew what was happening. Like all females Michelle was codependent, but in femmes codependency could become so sharp, so intense, that it reached psychic proportions. She could feel the atmospheric conditions that produced a gender meltdown, the currents spun her like a weather vane. She hoped her normative gender could somehow smooth the spiky vibrations. She would fill the small space of the squad car with classic female cheer. She would twinkle like a little star. A little, scrawny, strung-out rattlesnake star.
Michelle wished the public understood the extent gender deviation was punished in their culture. Her wish was naive, Aquarian — who did she think was punishing gender deviation, if not the public? Still, she dreamed of a Black Like Me experiment, something like the MTV show that put a bunch of skinny morons in fat suits and sent them out into the world to cry. People are so mean to fat people! was the tearful conclusion. Michelle loved reality shows that punked the ignorant into feeling compassion. It affirmed her belief that humanity was inherently kind. It just sometimes took a production crew and public humiliation to shock the heart into opening. She wondered if there was a way to enlighten the people to the struggle of her friends. Maybe if they shopped more they’d be more relatable, but you need money to shop and you need jobs for money and it was hard to get a job when people didn’t know what gender you were, hence the need for an illuminating television show. Michelle sighed. Maybe she would find meaningful work in Los Angeles after all.